Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year

May Sarton discovers the liberation of old age in this life-affirming journal

On the second day of her 80th year, May Sarton began a new journal. She wrote it because she wanted “to go on a little while longer;” to discover “what is really happening to me.”
 
This triumphant sequel to Endgame—Sarton’s journal of her 79th year—is filled with the comforting minutiae of daily life, from gardening to planning dinners and floral arrangements to answering fan mail. The wonderful thing about getting older, Sarton writes, is “the freedom to be absurd, the freedom to forget things . . . the freedom to be eccentric.” Her other octogenarian pleasures include preparing for holidays and weddings, lunches with old friends and new admirers, the heady delight of critical recognition, and the rebirth of her lyric voice as she creates new poems. Yet Sarton knows that age can also bring pain and ill health, as well as a deepening awareness of the “perilousness of life on all sides, knowing that at any moment something frightful may happen.”