To live in the center of the moment

by Barbara Frey Waxman

America's middle-aged population is reaching record numbers and this boom is having a significant effect on the popular marketplace. The effect is no less apparent in literature; whereas even twenty years ago, autobiographies often portrayed a youthful protagonist's coming of age, in recent years narratives of midlife and the elderly have become a popular literary trend. In To Live in the Center of the Moment, Barbara Frey Waxman examines the emergence of this evocative literature of aging and demonstrates how these autobiographies challenge negative cultural associations of old age. With such texts as Philip Roth's Patrimony, Madeleine L'Engle's The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, May Sarton's At Seventy, Howell Raines's Fly Fishing through the Midlife Crisis, Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals, and Doris Grumbach's Coming into the End Zone, Waxman has selected narratives that focus not on the broad sweep of a person's life but on the period when aging becomes central to the subject's