Publisher's Weekly Review
Almost 10 years after the publication of Athill's memoir Somewhere Towards the End, she bestows upon readers another gift of her elegant glimpses back at many of her life's most memorable moments. In beguiling, evocative prose, she details her nostalgia for growing up on her grandmother's farm; her harrowing, ambivalent feelings around unexpectedly becoming pregnant in her 40s and living through a miscarriage; and her decision to move into a retirement home, where she discovers that "nothing is more valuable than being free to do whatever you are capable of doing." After her miscarriage, she's relieved that she won't have to tell her mother about the pregnancy, and also that she is alive-she realizes that she loved being alive so much that "not having died was much more important to me by far than losing the child." Looking back on her life, Athill declares that she is happy, sharing the two valuable lessons she's learned: steer clear of romanticism, and abhor possessiveness. Athill has a charming and captivating way with a story, and a graceful, plainspoken manner of revealing the humor, gravity, and momentary beauty of a life fully lived. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Approaching her 98th birthday, the astonishingly vital and fiercely intelligent Athill adds a charming addendum to her previous memoir on aging, Somewhere Towards the End (2009). Following an introduction in which she muses about the pleasures of thinking about past events, people, and places, the author offers 11 essays filled with candid memories and reflections. The first is a fond recollection from the 1920s and 1930s of the garden at Ditchingham Hall (the kitchen garden was "a wonderfully thought-out and maintained fabrication of beauty"), her grandparents' country home in Norfolk, and the second is a look back at the 1940s and 1950s and the pleasures of life in postwar England. What follows are a variety of vivid accounts, the most deeply personal of which tells of her pregnancy in her early 40s, her decision to bear the child, and then the miscarriage that nearly killed her. For readers of a certain age, her decision to give up her independence, move into a home for the elderly, and discover unexpected pleasures there will especially resonate. Whether she is writing about clothes, books, possessions, or relationships, Athill seems always to be completely honest and without unnecessary sentiment. Death does not alarm hershe approves of the sensible, practical way that it is dealt with in her retirement homeand as an atheist, she finds no comfort in the idea of an afterlife. However, as she admitted in her previous memoir on aging, the actual process of dying causes some anxiety. In her final essay here, she allows that one cannot expect an easy dying, but one can still hope for it. Readers can hope that more crisp and thoughtful essays on life, old age, and death will be forthcoming from a centenarian Athill. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Ninety-seven-year-old Athill is not your typical assisted-living resident. She admits to slowing down and to seeking her new home so as not to burden friends, but a quick mind and vivid recall lie beneath that deceptive surface. Athill, the prize winning author of Somewhere towards the End (2008), plucks memories from her past, including those of her grandparents' lavish garden in the 1920s, the relief of VE day, the colonial divide in Trinidad, the loss of a pregnancy, and her lifelong affair with a married man. She also insightfully portrays her fellow residents. Athill writes beautifully, and her descriptions are precise and moving. As an avowed independent thinker, she doesn't shy away from politics or bucking society standards and makes no apologies for her choices. Instead, she celebrates being alive and vital well into her nineties. It's a slim book and far from a comprehensive look at the author's varied life. Rather, it offers an intriguing glimpse into mid-twentieth-century British intelligentsia and a reminder that the oldest of us have lots of stories to tell.--Smith, Candace Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE TITLE OF Diana Athill's 2009 memoir, "Somewhere Towards the End," published when she was 91, acknowledged in her no-fuss, charming way that her final hours were drawing nigh. "Somewhere" was presumably a last glance backward at her romances with married men in her frequent role as "the Other Woman," coupled with observations about caretaking her mother in her final days and insights on a variety of topics, from faith to fashion, from the perspective of "advanced old age." Athill, a longtime London book editor, concluded her elegant narrative by musing on possibilities for her deathbed quotation, admitting, "Foolish though it may be, I have to confess that I still hope the occasion on which I have to say it does not come very soon." For Athill, being foolish has often paid off - "without the memory of that delicious passion," she recalls of one disastrous affair, life "would have been much the poorer." And yearning for more time, in the midst of saying farewell, proved felicitous too. Now 98, Athill has provided us with an energetic follow-up, whose title, taken from a chapter about a brief, near-fatal pregnancy, doubles as a celebration of her own vibrant spirit. More a series of ruminations than a memoir, "Alive, Alive Oh!: And Other Things That Matter" serves as a companion volume to "Somewhere," an invitation to sit a spell with an intractable and witty friend who's pushed even further into what the poet May Sarton termed the "foreign country of old age." We hear different versions of stories Athill has told before, like those about the "beloved 'family'" she fashioned with a divorced playwright, his younger paramour and the younger woman's own husband and children. Like a character in a novel by Jean Rhys - an author Athill edited and writes about - she had little fascination with convention. "What I was really happy with," she declares, "was a lover who had a nice wife to do his washing and look after him if he fell ill, so that I could enjoy the plums of love without having to munch through the pudding." The waning of sexual heat is a major theme in "Alive," and the fact that it's replaced by different ardors - the contemplation of "all the most beautiful places and things that I once experienced" - speaks to the appeal of this little volume. For Athill, who would once, while "waiting to fall asleep ... run through all the men I ever went to bed with," other marvels now suffice, like recalling the "mystical experience" of her grandparents' gardens or enjoying a "shared sense of humor" in the "retirement home for the active elderly" where she now resides. Having moved there at 92, with "a twinge of dismay at being surrounded by so many old people," she discovered that they soon became "for each other wonderfully interesting stories." MORTALITY LOOMS, OF course, with Athill deeming it "silly to be frightened of being dead," though admitting "anxiety about the process of dying." She charts that process as experienced by loved ones, but doesn't dwell on the dangers of decline. Indeed, there's a welcome buoyancy in "Alive," as in a delightful scene where Athill, "too physically wobbly to be of any use," along with "nearly blind" Vera, 94, and Pamela, 94, agile enough to kneel but not to get back up without a hand, manage to plant a half-dozen roses. They emerge from the experience exhausted but triumphant. Stanley Kunitz, who was poet laureate of the United States at 95 and died in 2005 at 100, wrote in "Touch Me," the last work of "The Collected Poems": "What makes the engine go?/Desire, desire, desire./The longing for the dance/stirs in the buried life." For Athill, whose desire still courses, albeit in new ways, being further toward the end illuminates the joy in the ordinary. As she writes in a poem at the conclusion of this book: "Why want anything more marvelous/than what is." ROY HOFFMAN'S most recent novel, "Come Landfall," will be reissued in paperback this summer.