A Question of Age

A beautifully written, searing and powerful examination of women and ageing that you will not be able to put down: intense, compelling, poetic, raging.

Warning: this is not a self-help book. Or, a helpful book, necessarily. No one really needs 'help' with ageing. It will happen no matter what we do. Neither is it a book to guide you through these stages of ageing. This book will not ask you to love your lines. Or to post on social media that you feel privileged to age. This book is, instead, a howl of rage.

Grappling with ageing is one of the most confronting elements of being a woman. When we become invisible, when we lose our sexual currency, when we lose that elasticity in our skin, when our bodies soften and change, when our perceived 'value' to society dramatically falls, when our notion of self-worth takes a radical shift.

What do we do when our outside self doesn't match our inside self? That old woman staring back at her reflection in the mirror doesn't understand why she feels so young. So how do we adjust our perceptions of getting older? What does it mean to age as a woman? How do we adjust our thinking about being in the world? What is our currency now?

Jacinta believes that midlife is a crucial reckoning with despair and hope, a time when you are naked in the centre of the world and no-one notices or perhaps cares to look. Midlife is a time when you take stock — to look back and understand how you were made as a woman, and to look forward into the future, to see how you might unmake yourself to live the life that perhaps you should be living.

A Question of Age is incendiary, raging and raw, but also compassionate, insightful and powerfully energising. It is a book for every woman looking in the mirror thinking she no longer recognises herself. It is a book for our times.

Praise for A Question of Age

'ABC presenter Jacinta Parsons is by turns poetic, angry, and circumspectly detached in delivering an intriguing, often moving, collective portrait. A rumination on the female condition and ageing through the generations and beyond ... there is an epic quality to the book. This is distinctive and resonant.' Sydney Morning Herald

'A rich, first-person exploration of an issue common to us all. Parsons mines her own experiences in what becomes an immersive, often brutal, always honest 'the only way out is through' approach to ageing. Readers who enjoyed Annabel Crabb's The Wife Drought should enjoy A Question of Age for its depth, research and straight shooting. It is an insightful and thought-provoking read.' Books+Publishing

'Heartfelt, deeply thoughtful, blazing with truth-filled rage.' Peggy Frew

'Deep, honest, beautiful.' Julia Zemiro

'It's hard to explain the relief one feels when an author tells the truth like this. This is a work of love.' Clare Bowditch

'At once lyrical and searing, A Question of Age is a book of both power and vulnerability. A uniquely honest take on what it is to age in a woman's body; how age deconstructs us, and how we can also see it as a rebuilding, and a reinvention, it is the perfect antidote to the relentless stream of sexism and ageism that women ultimately contend with. Furious, lyrical, tender and ultimately inspiring, this is a book that should be read by all women, whatever their age.' Monica Dux

'A life-affirming and necessary read, Jacinta Parsons' illumination of womankind devours our female silence and complicity. I was equal parts proud and appalled, validated and illuminated — this book gets personal and goes deep into our collective female experience, I could not look away. Confronting, nurturing, heartbreaking and uplifting, all at once.' Mimi Kwa