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An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old
by Lucy Schiller
A deeply personal investigation into the current state of eldercare and what it means to grow old in America.
Unlike many other cultures, our collective stance toward older people in the United States has long been one of casual avoidance and neglect. This attitude became brutally clear during the height of the COVID pandemic, when too many people saw elderly deaths not as tragedies but as foregone conclusions.
Like many of us, Lucy Schiller experienced this callousness firsthand when her grandmother passed away during the pandemic. In the wake of this trauma, propelled by equal parts grief and curiosity about her own fear of aging, Schiller embarked on an investigative journey to understand why the prospect of aging is so frightening and how being "old" in America intersects with class, race, disability, and public policy.
From profit-driven networks of care facilities to systemic failures in economic support, the future of older Americans looks increasingly uncertain. In Aging Out, Schiller reports this crisis, sharing the human toll of inadequate housing, health care, and community, while simultaneously excavating her own complicated relationship with aging.
Combining the incisive reporting of Evicted with the beautifully rendered introspection of The Empathy Exams, Aging Out is an intimate and unflinching exploration of what it means to age in this country and why Americans―including Schiller herself―are so terrified of getting old.
"A deeply personal but frustratingly diffuse look at aging." ―Kirkus Reviews
"Aging Out is a luminous work of nonfiction reportage woven into a spiritual autobiography―a meditation on time, loss, and love as Schiller takes us on a journey through the industrial complex that surrounds the elderly while they grow old. Her story cuts into the heart of things, and has stayed with me long after I read it." ―Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone and The Wild Trees
"Lucy Schiller pulls the sprawling, opaque subject of aging in America out of the shadows of private and privatized experience and into the fuller light of history, politics, and the structures that shape our lives, combining the fervor of a journalist doggedly digging for answers with the patience of an essayist gently circling questions; the result is spectacular. Aging Out is an incisive and lyrical examination of the dangers and possibilities of aging in America―not only for the old but for all of us." ―Lynn Casteel Harper, author of On Vanishing
This information about Aging Out was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lucy Schiller is a nonfiction writer. Her work has been published at the Columbia Journalism Review, The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, West Branch, Speculative Nonfiction, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She was the Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Nonfiction at Colgate University (2020-2021) and the Provost's Visiting Writer in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa (2018-2019). She received her MFA from the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow.
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