Seventy: A Diary of My Seventy-First Year

An acclaimed journalist and chronicler of contemporary life, seventy-year-old Ian Brown is not going gently into his eighth decade. The outlook is more perilous than it was at age sixty, but Brown is determined--however hopelessly--not to let time get the better of him. During the course of his seventy-first year, Brown writes incessantly, traveling on assignment for The Globe and Mail across the United States in the months before the shocking 2024 election; holidays with family and friends, always aware he might not see them again; skis and rows and exercises like a madman while turning a wary eye on the live-forever movement; takes up pickleball and talks books; and in general tries (and frequently fails) to show some human courage in the face of the march of his dwindling years.

Along the way he encounters the lists that have suddenly become essential to daily life (what to take when leaving the house, what to pack for a trip, what to pick up at the drugstore); the indignities of medical tests and the shock of financing a retirement; the terrors and pleasures of growing older with one's spouse of four decades; the now-suspenseful drama of sex; the thrilling spectacle of watching adult children inhabit new roles of familial responsibility; and the shocking new lessons of life as an older person (accept compliments with grace, remember to smile, stand up straighter).

As the percentage of the American population over eighty-five will nearly triple in the next twenty-five years, Brown contemplates his mortality and that of his contemporaries for readers of all ages. Growing old--anything after seventy--is a grave challenge, but also enormously liberating: if there is something you want to say or do, now is your chance to say it or do it. "I have to keep taking chances," Brown reckons. "I don't want to give in too soon."

Author: Ian Brown
Publisher: Experiment
Published: 09/08/2026
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.02lbs
Size: 8.24h x 5.57w x 1.26d
ISBN: 9798893030624

About the Author
Brown, Ian: - Ian Brown is an author and a feature writer for The Globe and Mail whose work has won many awards. His book, Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-First Year, was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Non-Fiction as well as for the RBC Taylor Prize. He is also the author of The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son, which was one of The New York Times's 10 Best Books of the Year; it also won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and the Trillium Book Award. His previous books include Freewheeling, which won Canada's National Business Book Award, and the provocative examination of modern masculinity, Man Overboard. He lives in Toronto.