A Long Time Coming

A powerful collection of essays exploring what it means to grow old in our youth-obsessed world

To live a long life should be a joy; to be old should not be a burden.

With improved health care and higher standards of living, each generation is living longer than the last. Governments see our ageing population as an imminent disaster, and old age as a medical problem. We are encouraged to remain active, stay healthy, and work longer — in short, to refuse becoming old. But if living longer is really about staying young, do we risk turning a blind eye to issues facing the elderly?

Weaving interviews with research and memoir, Joosten undertakes a timely and clear-sighted investigation into the housing crisis as it affects older people, the politics of nursing-home care, the difficulties of dementia, support services for Indigenous Australians, and how the burden of caring for others can fall disproportionately on women.

Moving, passionate, and urgent, A Long Time Coming is a call for empathy in a society that valorises youth and self-reliance — a profound reminder that everyone has the right to be old.

Review by Caroline Baum

Anyone who has an elderly parent, family member or friend in their care or concern needs to read this immensely acute and sensitive collection of essays about old age and our attitudes to it.

Readers who found a great deal of useful wisdom and practical compassion in Atul Gawande’s global bestseller Being Mortal will immediately grasp how this book continues the conversation we need to have, indeed must have, about what kind of society we want to be in relation to our senior citizens. Those who have become invisible, those who are patronised and talked down to by strangers, those who have become homeless because life did not play out according to the script they had imagined for themselves, those whose mind has wandered off into a fog, those who find themselves utterly alone, with all their tribe gone.

Joosten writes with unvarnished clarity and empathy; the combination cuts through like a laser to what is most essential and urgent, most shocking and distressing about the current state of things. She calls on younger feminists to turn their attention to their older sisters who have been overlooked or neglected by the movement in the urgent and understandable quest for equal pay, maternity leave and other rights.

Policy makers, carers, relatives and anyone who cares, in the true active sense of the word, will find little solace here - although there are moments of shining and uplifting humanity, often where you least expect them, as well as valuable information about resources you may not be familiar with - but the challenge that Jooseten presents offers the opportunity to push for change.

I predict this book will win everything it can. More importantly, it should reboot a much needed public debate about aged care at a time when cuts to welfare are making the future look pretty dire. Our elders deserve better, and so, one day, will we. If we do nothing now, we’ll be the ones robbed of dignity and identity and have no one to blame but ourselves.

About the Author

Melanie Joosten works at the National Ageing Research Institute in Melbourne. Her debut novel, Berlin Syndrome, saw her named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist and receive the Kathleen Mitchell Award; it will be released as a major motion picture in 2016. Melanie holds a Master of Arts and a Master of Social Work. Her work appears in various publications, including Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Best Australian Stories 2014, and Going Down Swinging.