Meghan Cox Gurdon says some products only make sense once you're old enough to need them. Her example is the drugstore, and the comparison fits 20 Over 60, a new book of short stories by 20 writers in their later years. The stories are open to anyone. They land hardest on readers who've lived them. Gurdon reviews the book in Friday's Journal, Oct. 16.
Husband-and-wife editors Beth Weinhouse and David Galef put the collection together. Regal House publishes it, 266 pages for $21.95. The pair did 20 Over 40 back in 2006. That one answered 20 Under 30, a 1986 book of promising young writers. In their preface, the editors admit they once thought older age was “mostly about decline.” Twenty years on, they write of “a richness to this age that we hardly imagined.”
The stories are about the turns in life
Gurdon says the best pieces come from the famous names, and they all deal with the big shifts of older age. People retire. They get grandchildren. They sell the family home. In Paul Theroux's First Love, a grandfather spends a week in his married son's house. He's treated as the babysitter, and as a bit of a burden. Joyce Carol Oates writes of a long marriage that starts to feel strange from the inside. Jane Gardam, who died in 2025, gives us a freshly retired English couple hunting for friends. It turns spooky.
Not every story works, and Gurdon says so. But she saves real praise for the last one, by Galef himself. Receding Portrait follows one man down what she calls the one-way staircase of old age. A fall leads to the hospital. The hospital leads to rehab. Rehab leads to recovery, and recovery leads to another fall. The narrator feels like a container of years, loaded slowly, who has to walk carefully or spill. Gurdon closes with a line from thriller writer Tess Gerritsen, who once wrote that for a spy “gray hair is the best disguise.” Her point is that people over 60 are as mixed as any other group, and some of them are no fun at all.
Our read
This is Retirement · M10 territory, with a little Estate mixed in. Fiction tells the truth about these years better than a brochure does. Every turn in these stories is a money moment too. The grandfather's week with the grandkids is also a question of who pays for the plane ticket and the help. Selling the family home is often the biggest single check a retiree ever handles. And the fall, hospital, rehab staircase is among the costliest stretches of many lives. Medicare generally covers a limited run of rehab days after a hospital stay and then stops. The gap lands on the family.
Here's the connection. Galef's staircase is a line item in your plan, or it isn't. This week, make two checks. First, look for a number in your plan for rehab and home care after a fall, instead of an assumption that you'll never need it. Second, confirm your health-care power of attorney is signed and sits in a drawer someone else can find. The characters in these stories learn what they forgot after the fall. You'd rather know before. You check the roof in the dry season, while the ladder is still easy to climb.