A delightful read!  Lively, an 80 year old Brit who has written many novels for children as well as adults, sits back and contemplates the situation of old age.  Chapters on Old Age, Memory, Reading and Writing, and Six Things are terrific while the chapter on her life in Egypt as a child is less compelling.  The wonderfully wrought old age observations are too numerous to reproduce here as well as some pearls about writing fiction, connecting the arc of the plot in narrative fiction with the arc of one’s life, the former being complete while the latter remains a work in progress, albeit nearing the end.  (“Most of us settle for the disconcerting muddle of what we intended and what came along and try to see it as some kind of whole” and “The thing that vexes me about the prospect of my end is that I shan’t know what comes after.” and “Every life is tangled with a multitude of other lives, again in a perverse mix of choice and contingency.”)  Her chapter on reading contains more pearls and a few diamonds.  Her favorite three books are James’ What Maisie Knew, Golding’s, The Inheritors, and Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier.  Reading ‘frees me from the closet of my own mind.”  In another amazing connection she quotes at length Thomas Browne who was cited in Sebald’s Rings of Saturn.  Sebald references Borges and so does Lively.  Sebald also crosses paths with Jane Gardam, but I don’t think Gardam appeared in these pages.  Great fun and good to re-read the old age and reading chapters.