Still Life at Eighty: A Memoir
By Nicholas Delbanco
“Delbanco’s fluency, the self-reflexivity, the allusiveness and elusiveness, the wit are in service here to what feels like something new. — The Delbanco book I’ve been waiting and wanting to read for half my life. Bravo.”
—David Shields, author of Reality Hunger, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead
“Still Life at Eighty is a triumphant, wise, and elegant memoir that beautifully explores the experience of aging, the joy of life, the inevitability of its end, and Delbanco’s remarkably influential journey through the arts.”
— Charles Johnson, A National Book Award winner and MacArthur Fellow
“Houses, family, books, fellow writers, mentors, protégés, ghosts – the wide-eyed younger self meets the wise man looking back with gratitude …. A life worth reading: Nicholas Delbanco does it again.”
—James Carroll, author of The Cloister
“Nowadays the word “memoir” can conjure up gruesome tales of abuse, crime, and poverty. Happily, Nicholas Delbanco’s backward look at age 80 is a welcome rarity: this richly gifted author has been blessed with a fortunate life…. Delbanco’s birthday is time for a reckoning … Scores of houses (“repositories of memory”); rollicking friendships with the major writers of his time; a family troupe of loving women.”
–Lynn Sharon Schwartz, author of 29 books of fiction, essays and poetry including the celebrated novels, Disturbances in the Field and Leaving Brooklyn.
