Ian Brown follows up on his last memoir about aging with Seventy: A Diary of My Seventy-First Year.Johanna Schneller/Supplied
- Title: Seventy: A Diary of My Seventy-First Year
- Author: Ian Brown
- Genre: Memoir
- Publisher: Random House Canada
- Pages: 304
“But back to my colonoscopy!” It would be rare, in casual conversation, to encounter anyone so excited about a sensitive, invasive medical procedure, but perhaps this is one line of demarcation between interpersonal relations and memoirs.
There’s a certain amount of oversharing one must be willing to abide to navigate the memoir genre. In the age of Instagram and TikTok influencers documenting every aspect of their lives, no matter how mundane or trivial, the temptation for a memoirist to reveal highly intimate details about their daily routines, their physical and mental health, and their bodily functions is almost expected – there can be no such thing as TMI. It’s useless to complain about this; it’s practically baked into the genre’s expectations.
In his latest book, Ian Brown goes so far as to underscore his enthusiasm, appending that insouciant exclamation point to the end of a digression about his late father speaking to his cardiologist after being diagnosed with terminal cardiomyopathy.
Seventy: A Diary of My Seventy-First YearSupplied
Brown is commemorating his colonoscopy as part of Seventy: A Diary of My Seventy-First Year. The book is a follow-up to his earlier Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-First Year, conceived in response to the milestone of entering his seventh decade. Sixty, which was nominated for the RBC Taylor Prize, was a compendium of all the ways Brown’s body was betraying him, from wrinkling skin and thinning hair to vision changes and memory loss. It was also a ruminative account of the author’s thoughts on aging, filtered through his reading at the time (Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series and the collected poems of Philip Larkin) and interactions with friends and family.
Ten years on, Brown has decided once again to take his existential temperature. Seventy begins on Feb. 4, 2024, the author’s birthday, with an observation that might surprise some readers of his earlier book: “Seventy is the first age I have felt old.”
Brown spent the bulk of his previous memoir trying to deny, ignore or stave off the grand march of time, but in this new volume he finds there is no escaping it. If Sixty was, in large part, a lament for things not done, roads not taken and dreams not realized, Seventy is an even more straightforward reckoning with mortality, not as a theoretical concept but an existential fact.
“Time speeds up as we go,” Brown wrote in one of Sixty’s most piercing insights, “as each year is experienced as a smaller fraction of the whole.” Perhaps this accounts for the heightened sense of urgency in the new volume. “I know anything can happen anytime,” Brown writes now. “We all hang by a thread, and its thinness terrifies us all.”
The ravages of aging only increase that dread, at least on the page for Brown. He continues to ski and attend spin class and bicycle around Toronto, but he is finding it even more difficult to ignore the ways his body is changing, especially when it comes to that masculine attribute he habitually calls his “wasker.”
For Brown, much of the aging process involves fluctuating sexual potency (“there are more no shows than there used to be”) and persisting desire (“I’ve spent the week feeling – I would say horny, if the word didn’t seem too insistent for a seventy-year-old”). Brown does not seem irate or irascible about the changes in libido (or, as he fashions it, “li-bye-doh”) so much as merely perplexed. And it’s worthwhile to note his courage in frankly addressing matters of sexuality and aging as this still seems like a subject many would prefer to avoid thinking about altogether.
Elsewhere, Brown’s stamina seems admirable. He agrees to travel by bus across the United States for a Globe and Mail piece taking the nation’s political temperature prior to the November, 2024, presidential election, a journey that would exhaust most people half his age. He recalls encountering “tourists and commuters” alongside “semi-permanent wanderers” and being taken aback by the number of ordinary bus travellers who supported Donald Trump. (It is precisely this soft liberal blindness to the concerns of a forgotten demographic that, at least in part, allowed Trump to win both times, but that is a story for another day.)
The contrast between the American denizens he encounters on his cross-country voyage and Brown’s own day-to-day life is profound, if somewhat underexamined. For all his stated regret over not realizing some of his dreams or ambitions, his diaristic recollections involve literary salons at the home of novelist and pundit Stephen Marche; lunch with the “godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton; a different 2023 lunch at Toronto’s tony Le Germain Hotel, this time in the company of Martin Amis; along with various parties and other social engagements. His reading list ranges from Philip Roth to Nicholson Baker to Claire Keegan to Amis (both père and fils) to Hanno Sauer’s The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality (which Brown deems “often impenetrable”). This is all testament to a life thoroughly lived.
It is also to the author’s credit that he maintains a sense of proportion and a willingness to heed the counsel of a younger generation. Brown relates a story about being yelled at by a woman who assumed he was ogling at her in public (he was glancing at her specialty sunglasses). He wonders aloud whether a white man of a certain age should be castigated for simply looking at a younger woman. Brown’s now adult daughter, Hayley, suggests that his view of individual responsibility is too limited: what women see in these situations is more on the lines of a class struggle. In this, Brown admits, “she was, brilliantly, correct.”