Jacinta Parsons - A Question of Age: Women, ageing and the forever self

Its hard to explain the relief one feels when an author tells the truth like this. This is a work of love.

Clare Bowditch

Deep, honest, beautiful

Julia Zemiro

Heartfelt, deeply thoughtful, blazing with truth-filled rage

Peggy Frew

At once lyrical and searing, A Question of Age is a book of both power and vulnerability. A uniquely honest take on what it is to age in a womans body; how age deconstructs us, and how we can also see it as a rebuilding, and a reinvention, it is the perfect antidote to the relentless stream of sexism and ageism that women ultimately contend with. Furious, lyrical, tender and ultimately inspiring, Jacinta takes us on a journey of liberation; a tour of what it is to be a woman, and to cross over into midlife and beyond. This is a book that should be read by all women, whatever their age.

Monica Dux

A life-affirming and necessary read, Jacinta Parsons illumination of womankind devours our female silence and complicity, replacing it with a mediation on our impermanence that makes space for a fierce quietening, in order to hear the inner voice guiding us home. I was equal parts proud and appalled, validated and illuminated this book gets personal and goes deep into our collective female experience, I could not look away. Confronting, nurturing, heartbreaking and uplifting, all at once a beautifully woven insight providing a blueprint for embracing the inevitable.

Mimi Kwa

For Mika,

And your wild heart and ferocious mind.

You and I are not new,

Rather, the continuation of some other, long-ago-told love story.

I pay my respects to the Traditional Custodians of the lands and waters of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation where I live, write and work. I pay my respects also to the Traditional Custodians of the lands and waters of the Gunditjmara people, where I wrote some of this book.

I acknowledge that the colonisation of this country has attempted to destroy First Nations culture with systems that advantage white culture and directly disadvantage and harm First Nations women and their families. I acknowledge ageing for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women is burdened by an inequity in healthcare, generational trauma and an over-representation of our First Nations women and their families in the criminal justice system due to inherent systemic racism. I acknowledge the strength, resilience and the relationship First Nations women have always had, and will always have, with this land.

This book is full of my questions of age. Questions that are influenced and limited by my perspective as a white cisgendered woman who has been advantaged by a system that has actively disadvantaged people who are queer, First Nations and/or women of colour people who have a much greater likelihood of encountering high levels of discrimination as they age. While my identity as a disabled woman has given me an insight into some aspects of disability, and this book makes a serious endeavour to see beyond my own lived experience, I am committed to actively listening, learning, reflecting and challenging to fight for a feminism that is truly intersectional.

THIS IS NOT A self-help book. Or a helpful book, necessarily.

No one really needs help with ageing. It will happen no matter what we do we have been ageing since we first cried out in this world. When I was young, I would look at ageing as some kind of oddity as I traced my finger along the lines on the faces of my grandparents. Who are these strange people? I wondered.

I noticed that I was transforming into something new. That I had slowed down and that my face had changed. What was strange to me was that I didnt feel much different on the inside. Nothing felt like I thought it might. There is no sense that suddenly you change at a fundamental level and become someone who is older someone else.

I noticed a while ago that I was becoming see-through, like I have always imagined ghosts to be. And so I took it upon myself to find ways to lessen the impact of what happens when you are an ageing woman. I bought new creams and highlighting dust so that my skin wouldnt look as tired. And I was quietly terrified of what I believed I would be forced to become.

We have been taught to be repulsed, frightened and ashamed by the prospect of ageing. Older people, middle-aged people, people older than youth experience ageing in a western society as a barrier and a deficit. We have internalised ageism, and we confront it in the world around us every single day of our lives. Ashton Applewhite, one of the leading activists speaking out about ageism, believes that we have been active in the discrimination against our future selves: With ageism, we have internalised it. We have been complicit in our own marginalisation and it will require active consciousness-raising to correct that.

I am no better, of course. I have othered older women and quietly prayed that my skin would defy the inevitability of sagging. I was wary of the women who surely must have always been like this: Old. Tired. Sick. Angry. How could my self ever become like that? It was inconceivable to consider such a fundamental shift from the me as a young person and the me that would one day be old. How does it happen, this shift?

But now that Im embarking on it, I want to sink down into ageing, to find a way to reconcile with the past that has brought me to the start of this process. To understand how I was made so I can unmake myself in time to live the life that perhaps I should be living.

This is not a book that will ask you to reclaim your life, now that you have been discarded on the scrap heap. Nor will it tell you to scream into the void where you now reside, that ageing doesnt matter. Youre right, of course, it doesnt matter, but not for the reasons they force us to claim. Rather, it doesnt matter because the way weve been taught to think about ageing is a lie.

This is not a book to guide you through these stages of ageing. We will all do this in our own way and in our own time. We may skip stages, do some twice or thrice, or stay in one stage until we die.

This book will not ask you to love your lines. Or to post on social media that you feel privileged to age. Of course, this is all true; it truly is a privilege to age. This book primarily endeavours to understand our rage. Why, as women get older, do some of us seem to get really fucking mad? It doesnt seem to take much, if you push us even slightly, to find ourselves wanting to flip the fucking table (metaphorically, of course). I was beginning to understand that the rage I felt as I aged could not be separated from how it felt to live as a younger version of this person.

This is not simply a rage fuelled by the hormonal changes that I am yet again undertaking, this time through perimenopause and the state of menopause. I had long been told that I was wild and that when the force of fertility left my body I would become wilder. But surely this is a lie. This is not the source of my rage. It is something else altogether.

I want to trace a line back through my life to see if I can find where this all began.

***

When telling people that I was writing a book on ageing, I have mostly been in receipt of an incredulous but what would you know? eyebrow or two. It is true what would I know about ageing? This book is not about knowing; I am only at the early stages of what ageing will mean to me. Rather, this book is about asking how I might endeavour to do this well. Properly well. Not the kind of well that you might do if you want to overcome it or rise above it.