Act Your Age
A Coming of (Middle) Age Memoir
- History & Biography
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2025
FritzSearch.com earns a commission on purchases made through Bookshop.org links.
Publisher's Description
Act your age! From her mother's admonition in childhood, a middle-aged, twice-married mother of four and a product of the Deep South of the seventies makes her way through a meandering inner journey towards a quiet epiphany, revealing what her mother's words really mean. This rite of passage at the ungainly age of fifty unfolds through twelve memoir-like narratives that will evoke both laughter and tears. Each chapter is an independent reflection on the dozens of daily anecdotes that all people live each day in the course of growing up and growing older. Reading the narratives may be like going through a shoebox of old photographs found in the attic, not arranged in any seeming order but, in total, creating a logic of their own. Memorable characters rise from the narrator's Southern Gothic roots. The narrator, nameless Every Woman, prides herself in being an introspective and competent adult, but her naivete demonstrates that being an adult is really a state of mind. Coping with life's poignant struggles, like disease, old age, suicide, and murder, and its ordinary ones, like child-raising, teaching, pets, and churchgoing, she seeks sense in the nonsense with humor and with love.
Endorsements (3)
“Priscilla Biddle offers a loving portrait of a world we’re in danger of losing touch with: the real one, the world beyond our phones. The world of family and old friends, childhood memories and the lore of kinfolk, shared meals and music and laughter and grief. The world of home, both the place you start out from and the place, if you’re lucky, you get to discover and build with others.”
“Although my own coming-of-middle-age experience is significantly different from the one the narrator describes here, I found these stories to be fascinating and engaging for the vivid picture of a particular time and place in American cultural history that this collection paints. Priscilla Biddle has given us a portrait of the struggles and, most especially, the joys of family life over generations, something that we all long for at heart and so can appreciate deeply.”
“Act Your Age is a peek behind the curtain of the lives of a multi-generation Southern family. It is also the leitmotif of this loosely woven collection of essays: episodes of life’s journey as viewed through the eyes, heart, and received wisdom of a middle-aged woman. Reading it caused me to think of a quilt with blocks of life stitched together, creating a warm covering of memories.”
See something wrong on this page? Report a problem