By Marina Benjamin
Scribe, £14.99
As the year approached in which she would turn 50, Marina Benjamin, editor, author and mother, decided she needed to shake things up, to embrace movement, to welcome instability. She wanted, in the six months left until her decisive summer birthday, to push herself back into writing and, in this elegantly written, extended essay, she explores what it means to have lived for half-a-century, and contemplates what may be left in perhaps another half-century.
Benjamin starts by looking at the literature of ageing and there is a fascinating segment on the history of HRT, treatment, which may have partially succeeded in slowing the physical manifestations of age but has a dark personal history at its core.
She then talks movingly about her own triple loss - of a parent, her youth and her reproductive organs (following a sudden hysterectomy) and how, afterwards, she couldn't write a word.
