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Ian Brown, award-winning author of The Boy in the Moon and the memoir Sixty, now recounts his daily reckoning with the milestone age of seventy. Fearlessly candid, often funny and relentlessly real, Brown asks the terrifying questions we all have about growing old, even when he doesn’t want to know the answers.
An acclaimed journalist and chronicler of contemporary life, seventy-year-old Ian Brown is not going gently into his eighth decade. The outlook is more perilous than it was at age sixty, but Brown is determined—however hopelessly—not to let time get the better of him. During the course of his seventy-first year, Brown writes incessantly, traveling on assignment for The Globe and Mail across the United States in the months before the shocking 2024 election; holidays with family and friends, always aware he might not see them again; skis and rows and exercises like a madman while turning a wary eye on the live-forever movement; takes up pickleball and talks books; and in general tries (and frequently fails) to show some human courage in the face of the march of his dwindling years.
Along the way he encounters the lists that have suddenly become essential to daily life (what to take when leaving the house, what to pack for a trip, what to pick up at the drugstore); the indignities of medical tests and the shock of financing a retirement; the terrors and pleasures of growing older with one’s spouse of four decades; the now-suspenseful drama of sex; the thrilling spectacle of watching adult children inhabit new roles of familial responsibility; and the shocking new lessons of life as an older person (accept compliments with grace, remember to smile, stand up straighter).
As the percentage of the American population over eighty-five will nearly triple in the next twenty-five years, Brown contemplates his mortality and that of his contemporaries for readers of all ages. Growing old—anything after seventy—is a grave challenge, but also enormously liberating: if there is something you want to say or do, now is your chance to say it or do it. “I have to keep taking chances,” Brown reckons. “I don’t want to give in too soon.”
“I would read anything Ian Brown writes.”—Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief and Joyride
“Praise for Sixty
International Bestseller
Shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Non-Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2016 RBC Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction
A CBC Best Book of the Year
A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2015
"Mr. Brown is charming, thoughtful and edifying company. There’s loads to identify with in Sixty. More than that: There’s loads to flat-out adore. . . . Brown’s reflections on friendship are soulful and worth committing to heart. So are his meditations on marriage and parenthood.
”—The New York Times“A compelling take on the joys and agonies of growing older. . . . Brown peppers this memoir with crisp, self-deprecating asides, and a wry point of view that holds up to the very end. Where Brown really reels you in is with his sincerity. His insights, quips and candid assessments of aging are to be enjoyed by any Boomer nearing or having passed the big 6-0.”—Los Angeles Times
“A rich new book . . . Brown can’t help but turn some of the absurdities he faces into humor . . . The laugh-out-loud passages are tempered by a poignant theme Brown comes back to time and time again: regret.”—Forbes
“Brown asks all the right questions in Sixty, an account that is by turns witty and poignant. I laughed aloud.”—The Wall Street Journal
“A spark of humor shines through even these serious topics, which he handles gracefully. Well considered and illuminating, Sixty allows readers to delve deeply into the real meaning of maturity.”—Booklist
“Brown’s humor is pointed inward as often as outward, and he neither glosses over nor languishes on the fact that he has fewer years ahead of him than behind.”—Kirkus
“Provides readers, baby boomers in particular, with examples of how to live thoughtfully and observantly.”—Library Journal
“Those turning 60 will appreciate and find resonance with Brown’s honest grappling with his aging.”—Publishers Weekly
“Dark, funny, moving, compelling, Ian Brown’s Sixty is his intimate conversation with readers about life, love, regret, aging, and the inevitable changes time brings as he explores his own sixty-first year. Brown is that rare, brave writer who is willing—and able—not only to dig deeply and honestly into his own psyche, dreams, fears, and fantasies, but then to write about them in ways that are both intensely personal and also wisely universal.”—2016 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-fiction jury
“Funny, honest and profound.”—CBS
“Finding out Ian Brown has turned sixty is like finding out my bad little brother has turned sixty: I’d expect him to have a disarming, slightly disreputable take on this least interesting of birthdays (long now in my rearview mirror). And with Sixty, I’m certainly not disappointed. Ever the witty, ever the mischievous, observant and likable, Ian Brown has written a book that other sixty-year-olds can keep on their breakfast table, to dip into with their Ovaltine. It’s a splendid companion book to aging—a condition when ordinary companionship is, frankly, not always that agreeable.”—Richard Ford
“I’ve been reading Ian Brown since before I needed reading glasses. He’s wise—poetic even—and willing to be unabashedly petty, which is what makes this book so funny and almost too true.”—Sarah Vowell, New York Times–bestselling author of seven books, most recently Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
“Ian Brown is so wise and insightful and funny about the indignities of turning sixty that he makes those of us who haven’t yet reached that harrowing birthday believe that maybe it won’t be so bad. Surely, once we get there, we’ll all be as wise and insightful and funny as Ian is. We won’t, of course: This book, like its author, is one of a kind. A wonderful, inspiring, occasionally cringe-inducing chronicle of a very human year.”—Paul Tough, author of Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why
“Growing old has its burdens and pleasures. Ian Brown captures them both so beautifully that he almost makes the reader wish for sixty. There is a lot of wisdom in these pages.”—Ari L. Goldman, author of The Late Starters Orchestra
“Sixty may find [Brown’s] biggest audience yet; there are so many of us in the same creaky boat. Written with [Brown’s] trademark gutsy candour, and full of self-deprecating wit. . . . Edifying . . . accessible.”—Plum Johnson, award-winning author of They Left Us Everything, in the Globe and Mail
“Thoughtful, heartfelt, fearless, impossible to put down . . . Brown manages to be both hilarious and serious . . . His ultimate message—to pay attention, to keep our eyes open, to look at ‘what is coming down the road’—is vital.”—Quill & Quire, starred review
