HOW TO DRESS FOR OLD AGE

Coming soon to a bookshop near you.

TWO FRIENDS, TWO AGEING PARENTS, ONE SHARED QUESTION:

HOW TO LIVE MEANINGFULLY TO THE END?

Weaving memory, anecdote and reflection, How to Dress for Old Age is a work of love and reckoning showcasing two of Australia’s finest writers at the peak of their powers.

When adult children take up caring for absent fathers and stoicmothers, things can get complicated.

Room 306. Level Three. In inner city Melbourne, David Carlin’s

mother, Joan, is settling in. Five doors away, on the same floor of

the same institution, Peta Murray’s father, Frank, is halfway

through the statistically ordained 18 months he is likely to live

after entering “care”. Each is 86. He—an ex-builder and sometime

bon vivant—has shrunk inside his grey marle tracksuit but still fits

proudly into his Sixth Form blazer. She—a widowed mother of

three since the age of 31, turned activist, community leader and

doer-of-many-things—is throwing on colourful scarves and

preparing to re-invent herself again.

Murray and Carlin take up the labour of care for their ageing

parents while contemplating their own “third age”. Murray is 60

and an early career researcher in a late career body. Carlin is a

newly minted professor at 55, thinking about escape. Each is yet

to fully imagine what comes next.

Tender, funny and confronting, the book’s dual voices unfold along parallel and

intersecting tracks, queer and straight, female and male. Part valedictory, part

costume parade, it charts the complex dance steps of Father and Daughter, and

Mother and Son, as they try on countermoves to the diminishments of age and the

pervasive forces of ageism, inside and out.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Peta Murray is known for plays Wallflowering, and Salt, as well as AWGIE-winning works of community theatre Spitting Chips and The Keys to the Animal Room. Peta’s short fiction has been published in Sleepers Almanac and New Australian Stories. Senior Lecturer at RMIT University in Melbourne, she is a co-editor and contributor to Bloomsbury Academic’s A-Z of Creative Writing Methods. Her essays have appeared in Sydney Review of Books, The Mekong Review and TEXT Journal.

David Carlin’s books include Our Father Who Wasn’t There, The Abyssinian Contortionist, and The After-Normal. His essays have appeared in Overland, Meanjin, Griffith REVIEW, Hunger Mountain, Westerly and Sydney Review of Books. David began his career as a writer/director with Red Shed Theatre, Melbourne Workers Theatre, Circus Oz and Arena Theatre, and has made award-winning films and radio essays. Co-President of the NonfictioNOW conference and Emeritus Professor at RMIT, he co-founded the WrICE cultural exchange program and non/fictionLab.