The ‘us’ and ‘them’ that old age can create

Abstract

Didier Eribon‘s memoir, The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman was prompted by the occasion of his mother being moved into a nursing home when she could no longer care for herself. The resulting book, rooted in autobiographical reflection and influenced by the work of Foucault, Elias and Beauvoir on old age, is a nuanced, frank interrogation of how class and gender interact to shape a person’s experience of old age, writes Mary Evans.