Agony Aunt Irma Kurtz: If You're Over 60, Don't Act Your Age

by Penny Wark

It says something about life in 2009 that the cover of Irma Kurtz's book on ageing shows her not as the Tiggerish old bat that she is, but as a vibrant young woman. This is not Irma's doing but she is sanguine about the media's priorities. Would I like her to talk about sex, she volunteers.

It's a kind offer. But she has told us often enough about the promiscuous period in her twenties, the affair with the married man and the abortion at 30, the deliberate conception of a child out of wedlock at 37 and the decision to become celibate at 48, taken because she was giving up on love and it made sense to give up sex at the same time.

No thank you, let's talk about getting old. This is Irma's theme in About Time: Growing Old Disgracefully, and her views are insightful because that is what she does, most notably as Cosmopolitan's agony aunt. She has done that for 36 years and still advises on the enduring themes of frustration, sexual jealousy, insecurity and competitive friendship, but at 73 she finds herself confronted by new territory. She is old, she says, and the book is a necessary exploration of that state because the templates followed by her parents and grandparents don't fit any more.

“We really are pioneers. This generation of old people, there's never been anything like us before. We live in the present. It has to do with us and now, not us and our memories. Oh, we take them with us and we're made by them, but that doesn't mean that you don't exist now and have an effect in the present. We have to find ways of staying in life. We, the aged, must remain curious and able to change our minds. It's as important as a flexible spine. More, maybe. In the long run you do have to work at being alert. You have to not give in to being old.”

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March 13, 2009

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