Athill, a fascinating English woman, wrote this memoir when she was 89 years old.  Having spent more than 40 years as an editor at a small London publishing house, she turned her writing skills to memoir beginning in her forties and continuing with her final book, “Alive, Alive Oh and Other Things that Matter” written when she was 98.  I  have also read her earlier memoir, “Stet” which I loved because of her detailed descriptions of her editing of authors like V.S. Naipaul and Jean Rhys. “Somewere Towards the End” won the 2008 Costa Biography Award.  The Costas, originally called the Whitbread Awards, were described as a more populist version of the Booker.  These awards were abruptly stopped in 2021.

All three of her memoirs were readable, interesting, and enjoyable. I liked this book a bit less than the other two because, as I close in on my 80th birthday, perhaps it struck too close to home with her straightforward descriptions of the decline in ability (auto accidents), sexual appetite, and other earlier joys of life that accompanied her entry into her 90’s.  Despite aging, she carried on bravely driving between her London flat on Primrose Hill that she occupied for more than 40 years and a childhood home in Norfolk, reading and writing, and looking back on a rich life with a sharp eye, a candid pen, and mostly contentment.

Athill died in 2019 at the age of 101, after achieving some fame on a BBC radio show, Desert Island Discs in 2004 where she chose records and books that she would take to a desert island.  Haydn’s “The Creation” and Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” led her lists.

Her obituary in The Guardian described her thus: “Although she often wrote about tragedy, she was far from a tragic figure. Softly pink-skinned, warm-hearted but never cuddly, she remained, in elegant old age, an optimistic, inquiring woman. She was an entertaining conversationalist – her talk, which had the same searching tone as her writing, was delivered in a crisp upper-class timbre.”  

I recommend all three of her memoirs for anyone who enjoys fine writing, reading about writers and post-WWII London, and for those of us who are searching for meaningful ways to continue our vibrant lives as we move into ‘somewhere towards the end.”