I want to say this plainly because I spent years believing the opposite.
Not at twenty, where sixty was simply abstract, a number so far forward in the calendar of a life that it had no texture, no specific weight, no particular meaning beyond the general understanding that it was a lot of years and a lot of years were a long time. Not at twenty. But at forty, at forty-five, at the edge of fifty where the culture begins its particular project of preparing women for their disappearance, its gentle insistence that certain things are now behind her and she should make her peace with the behind-herness, that the appropriate response to arriving at fifty is a graceful acceptance of reduced visibility, a stepping-back from ambition, a settling-into.
I did not settle.
Or rather: I settled some things that needed settling, the things that were never right for me and that I was holding out of obligation or habit rather than genuine wanting. But I did not settle the ambition. I did not settle the desire for the work to mean something. I did not settle the writer, who was always there and is here now, more productive and more honest than she was at thirty-five when she was too busy to write and too afraid to write and told herself both of those things were about time when one of them was about fear.
At sixty I am the best writer I have ever been.
I say this without qualification because the qualification would be the old habit, the hedging, the making-smaller before anyone else can make-smaller for me. I am the best writer I have ever been because I have more to say and less reason to be careful about saying it and more practice at the saying and less performance in the saying, because the writing now comes from a place that is past the managing of impressions, that has decided the truth is more interesting than the managed version, that has sixty years of material and the willingness to use it.
Sixty is not old. Sixty is the beginning of the part where you finally know enough to do the thing properly.
I am doing the thing properly. I intend to keep going.
