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What are Second Half Stories?
They're tales of men and women discovering that life after middle age is not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning. That's why they take off on riding mowers at seventy three, stumble, recover, develop, and transform, learn to trust and forgive as never before, and reassure the skeptics, as May Sarton did at seventy "Yes, it is better being old. I am more myself than I have ever been. There is less conflict; I am happier, more balanced, and I know how to use my power."
Here at Second Half Stories it is our mission to introduce you to these new visions of life's second half so that you can use them to reshape your own.
Welcome Old Friends and New
It has been six years since I first “discovered” these little known, immensely reassuring and increasingly numerous movies and novels about the transformation of life’s second half. Our efforts to introduce them to wider and wider audiences so that they can help us all to outgrow the negative and increasingly inaccurate notion that life after fifty is all about stagnation, isolation, and decline, have met with increasing success. I first began to show them and discuss them in the Boston area, and then won two National Endowment for the Humanities Grants to showcase them at Lifelong Learning Institutes around the country. Nineteen LLIs from coast to coast enthusiastically participated, and many of them are still running our first program The Elderquest in Today’s Movies and Novels or variations on it. I have also developed a second set of programs for LLIS and other institutions, The New Cinema and Literature of Age, Part Two: Men, Women, and Late Life Relationships, and I suspect that our list of converts nationwide now numbers in the thousands.
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Yes, it is better being old. I am more myself than I have ever been. There is less conflict; I am happier, more balanced, and I know how to use my power. |
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| - May Sarton |
Away from Her (2007)This hauntingly beautiful and heartbreakingly real story of Alzheimers and its impact on both patients and caregivers is based on a story by Alice Munro, The Bear Came over the Mountain. Fiona (hristie)develops the dread disease and her husband, Grant (Pinsent), agrees that she should go to Meadowlake, where she develops an infatuation with another patient, Aubrey, (apparently a not uncommon occurrence). Grant is then “away from her,” as much as she is away from him How he and Marian (Dukakis), Aubrey’s wife, respond to this is complex, human, and quite profound, a kind of allegory of what it means to discover that things never work out as one expects. Brilliant performances by all four principals including Murphy as the much diminished and weepy Aubrey. ...Read the full review |
Men, Women, and Late Life Relationships (Available Summer 2008)$300.00 Pre-order Now! A second set of programs on movies, novels, and the transformation of life’s second half focuses on gender and its impact—on men, on women, and the late life relations between them. The extensive study guide and its five different curricula will be available here for download sometime in September of 2008, but pre-orders are being taken now. $300.00 |