Ageing eludes literary and critical representation in a number of ways. It is, for one thing, a moving target: a process of continuous biological and biographical change rather than a discrete object of attention. Those who study age prefer to think in terms of growing older than in terms of an absolute state of being old. It is also difficult in practice to determine and compare age categories: chronological age does not always align with expected quality of health, physical capacity or mental acuity. With greater longevity, as well as more fluidity in the shape of careers and variance in childbearing age, the idea of fixed life stages has given way to a more relativized conception of old age, its boundaries and its limitations. It might be as well, as Rüdiger Kunow suggests, to think of ageing not “as essence, biological, chronological or otherwise,” but as difference itself: “the difference that time makes” (Kunow 295).

The subjective experience of ageing is also particularly difficult to capture. It is hard to represent, let alone give compelling narrative shape to what Kathleen Woodward has described as an “infinitesimally incremental process of the subtraction of strengths” (Aging and Its Discontents 38). In this sense, ageing is grindingly linear – an inexorable process with no dramatic arc. Conversely, however, it is also bafflingly, unpredictably non-linear. We may feel creaky one day, and sprightly the next. We can feel old at forty and young, at least temporarily, at seventy. Simone de Beauvoir famously observed just such an “insoluble contradiction” between the clarity of the feeling that “guarantees our unchanging quality,” and the “objective certainty of our [external] transformation” (323). Only at a very advanced age, perhaps, is one – as Ursula Le Guin observed in her memoir of old age – unable to maintain this contradiction: “If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub” (Le Guin 9). A new knowledge of our intractable materiality asserts itself just at the moment when our material selves start to feel stranger and less compliant with our will.