Introduction

Abstract

In a review of the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert’s book on ageing, You’re Looking Very Well (2011), Will Self reflects on his recent experience of publicly discussing ageing and fiction with Fay Weldon at Brunel University in an event organized by the authors of this book as part of the Fiction and Cultural Mediation of Ageing Project (FCMAP). Self notes that at this event when questions were opened to the audience — ’the vast majority of whom had either grey or white hair’ — Weldon and he were asked whether novelists surely had a responsibility to depict old age positively. At the time, they both disagreed with the premise underpinning this set of questions on the grounds that writers are primarily concerned with the particularities of character rather than promoting a social good. However, as a result of reading Wolpert’s account of the ‘abuses and depredations’ to which older people are often subjected, Self declared himself to have become more open-minded concerning these questions, particularly in view of one of the statistics Wolpert provides:

As for portraying older people in an unkind light, I’m not sure I’ll be doing that any more from now on. A statistic Wolpert likes so much he cites it twice is that younger people who have a negative view of old age die younger.