AGING OUT

The problems and pressures of aging in the United States today.

Journalist and professor Schiller’s well-intentioned debut moves between her personal experiences as a thirty-something freelance writer and those faced by people getting older in America in the present. Her interest in the subject began when her grandmother, then in her mid-90s, died of Covid-19 in 2021, contracted, Schiller believes, “from a home health aide who had likely taken off her mask.” “I could not tell if her death had been natural or unnatural,” she mused at the time, and the question sent her spiraling down a rabbit hole into an investigation of “the aging industrial complex.” Anchoring the book in her experience living in Pittsburgh, a place she moved to during the Covid-19 pandemic, knowing no one, and walking for miles with her dog every day while “figuring out how to be alone in my own brain,” she ventures out into mini-essays on topics to do with aging: the difference between assisted living facilities and nursing homes, the pros and cons of Medicare Advantage and standard Medicare, the changes over the years in AARP, the history of the Gray Panthers, and the issues raised by companies like Papa, which provides companions for old people at a price. Although Schiller does discuss an older woman she volunteered to help occasionally with her shopping and other needs, surprisingly few other old people appear in the book. Instead of focusing outward, her writing often circles back to her own loneliness and fear that “I could prepare as best I could and still not be able to control where I ended up, and how.”

A deeply personal but frustratingly diffuse look at aging.