Writing Well Past 70—and Loving It

When friends and family sometimes remark on how productive I’ve been as a writer, especially since 18 years ago I passed the proverbial three score and 10, I usually shrug. “Productive?” I’ll say. “Mostly, I’m steady.” If you go to your desk every day, and get only a page or two done, I’ll explain, that still adds up to a book-size 500 or more pages a year... and it’s what I still do most days, as I near my 90th birthday.

(How I Stopped Sabotaging My Writing Goals.)

And yet, I’ll smile to myself and wonder: How is it that, since I turned 70, I have actually published eight books, with a ninth, Dickens in Brooklyn: Essays on Family, Writing, and Madness, due out a month before my 88th birthday? And—what I don’t mention—I’ve also been working on a half-dozen other books—three novels, one nonfiction book, a short story collection, and a second collection of essays—books I’m fine-tuning and hoping to publish in the next few years.

I’ll sometimes work on fiction in the mornings, and nonfiction in the afternoon. My mantra, as it’s been for more than 50 years—“Routine is a condition of survival”—is from Flannery O’Connor. I discovered it in a book of her letters when I was in my 20s, typed it out, and taped it to the wall next to my desk. “If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time,” O’Connor wrote to a friend, “you’ll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.”

She went on to tell her friend that when he was at his desk, he should turn off his phone, not pay bills, and that if he didn’t get any writing done, it didn’t matter because important work was still being done: He was nurturing new work and making choices about what not to write.

In addition to the routines that have become lifetime habits, there’s something else that has made the years past 70 so happily and surprisingly productive: the absence of old responsibilities. For most of their lives, I’ve been single parent to my three children, all of whom are now well-launched into lives of their own. My mother, for whom I was guardian for the last dozen years of her life, passed away two decades ago, and I no longer have to do what many of us do when caring for our aging parents.

For more than 50 years I was caretaker and advocate for my brother Robert, who spent most of his life in and out of mental hospitals, psych wards, and halfway houses. He passed away in 2015, and I’m no longer involved in caring for him, and in what was an ongoing struggle to get the institutions and individuals who were paid to care for him do their jobs.

Once my children had graduated from college and left home, I moved out of the large 19th century New England house in which I’d raised them, sold our family’s two old cars, and moved into a mostly care-free and repair-free 1,200-square-foot apartment in New York City.

And there’s something else that comes with being a writer who’s been on the job for nearly 70 years: Although I still have hopes and ambitions—for reviews, sales, recognition, etc.—I’m increasingly ambitious not for the author of my books, but for the books themselves. Although my writing life is not without frustrations, I still do the work I love every day, still take pride in a sentence well-made, and still rejoice in making something new—something that had no existence until I imagined it into being.

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