Sixty

Shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Non-Fiction as well as a finalist for the RBC Taylor Prize, Sixty is a wickedly honest and brutally funny account of the year in which Ian Brown truly realized that the man in the mirror was...sixty. By the author of the multiple award-winning The Boy in the Moon.     Sixty is a report from the front, a dispatch from the Maginot Line that divides the middle-aged from the soon to be elderly. As Ian writes, "e;It is the age when the body begins to dominate the mind, or vice versa, when time begins to disappear and loom, but never in a good way, when you have no choice but to admit that people have stopped looking your way, and that in fact they stopped twenty years ago."e;     Ian began keeping a diary with a Facebook post on the morning of February 4, 2014, his sixtieth birthday. As well as keeping a running tally on how he survived the year, Ian explored what being sixty means physically, psychologically and intellectually. "e;What pleasures are gone forever? Which ones, if any, are left? What did Beethoven, or Schubert, or Jagger, or Henry Moore, or Lucien Freud do after they turned sixty?"e; And most importantly, "e;How much life can you live in the fourth quarter, not knowing when the game might end?"e;     With formidable candour, he tries to answer this question: "e;Does aging and elderliness deserve to be dreaded--and how much of that dread can be held at bay by a reasonable human being?"e; For that matter, for a man of sixty, what even constitutes reasonableness?