Strategies for enlisting courageous, productive and involved elders who exemplify how it’s done. “Do you think of YOURSELF as ‘an old lady’?” “Yes, Jane, I do,” I say to my good friend of 60 years. I suspect that’s not the answer she’s hoping for. Who wants to see herself as old? I started picking up “good” much-older women — my old ladies — before I turned 50. Now I’m old enough to…

A short post you must read, because I know you’re dying to hear what happened — Almost two months ago, in the throes of procrastination, I wrote: Instead, of writing, I decided to not-write — a strategy I’ve honed over the years. Today that meant tackling some 16,000 emails I haven’t erased. I left readers with advice I struggle to follow: Read your emails. Read them as they come in. Read and erase.

What I’ve learned from my “enlightened” but not-much-older new recruits — and how they can help YOU age better, too! — I am in Paris, waiting until it’s late enough in New York to wish Betty a happy 91st birthday. My original old ladies — women like Marge, Zelda, and Sylvia were old enough to be my mother. My first, Henrietta, was 75 to my 43. So it’s a bit of…

On the passing of two old ladies who lived until the end and died as they lived — and what they taught me to hope for. — None of us knows our end. Is it morbid or depressing to imagine your last days? I think not. It will happen. Death is more dependable than taxes. And we don’t get to choose or even preview how it will visit us. Still, it can’t hurt to visualize what you’d…

My unexpected outpouring of “Potty Lit” flowed its way to a loyalreadership. Can you blame me for smiling and sharing? — The Birth of Potty Lit A month ago, pushing out a second piece about the elimination of bodily fluids and, later, realizing that other writers also produced bathroom stories (all puns intended), I recognized the genre as “potty lit.” A questionable and somewhat political genre devoted to pee and poop, the places we piss and…

A Cautionary Tale About Publishing Is Amazingly Current Twelve Years Later. — Iwas thrilled and shocked when an editor at Publishers Weekly — Bible of the word business — chose my essay, “The Audacity of Hype” for its “Soapbox” feature. The editor kept the title and added this teaser underneath. Authors need to publicize their books, but not forever. I submitted “Audacity“…

An experiment with an online analyzer yields a truth about what we’re willing to do to attract readers — Last spring, in one of my sporadic and short-lived quests to improve my Medium stats, I followed the advice of a noteworthy fellow writer, Julia Hubbel, and signed up for Headline Studio. Good advice, Julia, thanks. But most of us don’t follow advice anyway. To be honest, I don’t always…

Asked whether it’s “uncomfortable” to give advice, a writer on the front lines ponders: Are we born or made? Why so many do it and so few listen? What to beware and what to NEVER forget. — In 2014, I initiate a lunch with fellow journalist Pamela Druckerman, hoping to interest her in covering the ideas in my recently-published book, Family Whispering. Also, she lives in Paris, where I am spending increasingly large chunks of time.