This is 57: Bestselling Author Catherine Newman Responds to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire

"Maybe it’s more that I’m *immature* than that I’m young for my age."

From the time I was 10, I’ve been obsessed with what it means to grow older. I’m curious about what it means to others, of all ages, and so I invite them to take “The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire.”

Sometimes you’ll find responses from writers, musicians, and artists you’ve heard of—like Kate Pierson, Neko Case, Rosie O’Donnell, Ava Duvernay, Jerry Saltz, Lucy Sante, Ricki Lake, Hilma Wolitzer, Elizabeth Gilbert, Judith Viorst, Cheryl Strayed, Deesha Philyaw, Chloe Caldwell, etc.—but more often it will be people (of all ages) you haven’t heard of, Humans of New York-style.

Here, author

Catherine Newman

responds. -Sari Botton

PS If you’re enjoying the work I do here at Oldster, please consider supporting it by becoming a paid subscriber. 🙏 Through Saturday, 11/1, I’m offering 20% off for life.

---

“2005: Birdy took these pictures of me pretending to write. That’s Jellyfish in my lap and, on my person, a t-shirt that says ‘Magic and Brain’ from the magical, brainy poet Kate Baer.

Catherine Newman is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoirs Catastrophic Happiness and Waiting for Birdy, the middle-grade novel One Mixed-Up Night, the kids’ craft book Stitch Camp, the best-selling how-to books for kids How to Be a Person and What Can I Say?, and the novels We All Want Impossible Things, Sandwich, and Wreck. Her books have been translated into fifteen languages. She has been a regular contributor to the New York Times, Real Simple, O, The Oprah Magazine, Cup of Jo, and many other publications. She writes the Crone Sandwich newsletter on Substack and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

—

How old are you?

57.

Is there another age you associate with yourself in your mind? If so, what is it? And why, do you think?

I live in the town where I went to college and I work at the college where I was a student when my husband and I met and fell in love. My best friends from then still live here too—the friends I housesat with the summer we made rhubarb crumble five times a week and watched all the home-movie VHS tapes of our anthropology professor as a young dad, dancing with his babies. So maybe I still kind of think of myself as a young adult? 21?

I’ll walk past a tour group on campus and smile to myself, thinking that everyone probably mistakes me for a college student, and then I have to laugh because not only do they not mistake me for a college student, but one student actually asked me once if I had been alive during the last pandemic—as in, the Spanish flu of 1918.

Do you feel old for your age? Young for your age? Just right? Are you in step with your peers?

I feel young for my age, even though I realize that I don’t look especially young. I got a pair of used metallic silver pleather jeans, and when I wear them to do an event, I feel like a rockstar. I’ve taken up tennis in the past couple of years. I’m newly successful at my career. I laugh at dick jokes, poop jokes. Sometimes I get stoned and laugh so much and for so long that one time my daughter made a video of me that’s just my back, shaking silently with laughter, for five minutes. Maybe it’s more that I’m immature than that I’m young for my age.

I live in the town where I went to college and I work at the college where I was a student when my husband and I met and fell in love. Maybe I still kind of think of myself as a young adult? 21? I’ll walk past a tour group on campus and smile to myself, thinking that everyone probably mistakes me for a college student, and then I have to laugh because not only do they not mistake me for a college student, but one student actually asked me once if I had been alive during the last pandemic—as in, the Spanish flu of 1918.

What do you like about being your age?

When it’s just my husband and me home, I’ll drain a can of chickpeas and start frying them in olive oil while I put all the raw vegetables we have in a bowl: chopped cabbage, sliced celery, cucumbers, salad greens, whatever. Maybe diced apples too. Always feta and sliced pickled pepperoncini peppers, sometimes toasted almonds, everything dressed with a sharp, garlicky vinaigrette. When the chickpeas are crisp, I cool them briefly and add them to the salad. And that’s dinner. Like, four out of seven nights. I miss my kids every minute of my life, but I cannot tell you how happy I am not be boiling and serving steaming plates of pasta.

Another thing I like, perhaps more significantly, is no longer being ornamental. I mean, I was never purely ornamental, obviously, and I am still ornamental, in a good way, to the sensible oldsters who understand how deep my hotness runs. But I mostly move through the world unmolested by the free-floating, aggressive, and presumptuous sexual energy of men, and I like it. I love it. Also? My husband’s sideburns are graying? And this is essentially the sexiest thing I have ever laid eyes on.

“1991: Michael and me in our Berkeley, CA apartment when we were 22. Yes, I believe that is just a bag of trash hanging from the knob.”

What is difficult about being your age?

My kids don’t live at home anymore! That is by far the hardest thing, one of the greatest losses of my life. Loss in general, though, of course—losing my lifelong best friend, dreading the loss of my parents, which looms. I love getting to take care of them and I’m good at it, but their aging is very, very challenging to me because I am such a kid still—their kid. I am the queen of preemptive grief, so I can really live inside of a loss that has yet to occur.

Also, I miss my big ass, which I, tragically, used to have mixed feelings about and which I, incorrectly, assumed I would keep forever and then I woke up one morning and it had drazzled all away.

I feel young for my age, even though I realize that I don’t look especially young. I got a pair of used metallic silver pleather jeans, and when I wear them to do an event, I feel like a rockstar. I’ve taken up tennis in the past couple of years. I’m newly successful at my career. I laugh at dick jokes, poop jokes. Sometimes I get stoned and laugh so much and for so long that one time my daughter made a video of me that’s just my back, shaking silently with laughter, for five minutes. Maybe it’s more that I’m immature than that I’m young for my age.

What is surprising about being your age, or different from what you expected, based on what you were told?

My dad is one of the most philosophical people I’ve ever known. And so, really, I’ve grown up listening to him muse about the disconnect at any given age between the number and how he feels, which has been helpful to me. A few years ago—he was probably 90 then—he described catching a glimpse of himself in a storefront and doing a total doubletake: “That old man is me?” It made us laugh, but it has also helped frame for us some of our own experiences of surprise, like when my husband and I accidentally qualified for a senior discount at the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. We were like: Us? Because we don’t feel the way our age sounds.

Or, I should say, we don’t always. I mean, we are creaky and you can hear our knees and hips popping and our pubic hair is falling out, etc. But mostly we just feel fairly continuous with our lifelong sense of ourselves.

What has aging given you? Taken away from you?

Given: confidence. Taken: the huge ass, sob.How has getting older affected your sense of yourself, or your identity?

This one is complicated because we newly have enough money—I’m finally not hustling every second of my life to write for every dollar I can eke out of everybody’s alumni magazine or lifestyle website—and there’s really no accounting for the change this has effected on my mental health. I worry much less about money and, therefore, everything else; much more of my time is discretionary. I still work my halftime college administrator job (I’m the secretary of the Creative Writing department), but the rest of my life is not a total freelance scramble in the way that it had been for twenty-five years.

I did not imagine I would ever experience the luxury of this kind of enoughness—and to be clear, we’re not rich in the traditional sense—and so I am grateful and surprised about it every day. I recently bought a bagel with cream cheese at the airport (we would typically have brought bagels from home to save money) and my husband was like, “I’m sorry, are we Bill Gates now?” I just replaced my twenty-year-old Honda—the car whose windows I have not been able to open in five years—and I was complaining to a friend how this car disrupts the pride I’ve always had in my scrappiness, and she was like, “Catherine, it’s a used KIA. I think you can absorb this car into your identity.” And perhaps she’s right. But I wish everyone could experience this kind of relief. I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m boasting. I am just talking, really, about how difficult and uncreative it is to worry about money all the time.

What are some age-related milestones you are looking forward to? Or ones you “missed,” and might try to reach later, off-schedule, according to our culture and its expectations?

We have basically waited our whole lives to get the $80 senior lifetime pass that gets you into all the national parks FOREVER. That will be in five years, when we’re 62! It is probably the best deal in the whole country and if this administration takes it from us, I will chain myself to the White House gate and make them look at my increasingly hairy asshole every day.

I mean, also, grandkids? But that’s not up to me, obviously, and if my kids don’t have kids I will simply force myself on other people’s grandkids in the oppressive-fake-aunt style I have perfected.

We newly have enough money—I’m finally not hustling every second of my life to write for every dollar I can eke out of everybody’s alumni magazine or lifestyle website—and there’s really no accounting for the change this has effected on my mental health. I did not imagine I would ever experience the luxury of this kind of enoughness. I just replaced my twenty-year-old Honda—the car whose windows I have not been able to open in five years—and I was complaining to a friend how this car disrupts the pride I’ve always had in my scrappiness, and she was like, “Catherine, it’s a used KIA. I think you can absorb this car into your identity.” And perhaps she’s right.

What has been your favorite age so far, and why? Would you go back to this age if you could?

I almost want to say this one, but is that too corny? I guess I would pick an age where the kids were still home but were capable of vomiting into a receptacle versus spraying it all over the house? So, maybe, when they were 17 and 14? That would have been when I was 48. The caveat here is that I was drinking then, and even though I loved drinking, you couldn’t pay me enough to go back to it.

“2005: Me, Ben, and Birdy at a wedding. From the years when I felt like I was covered in children every second.”

Is there someone who is older than you, who makes growing older inspiring to you? Who is your aging idol and why?

The ever-awake Mary Oliver (before she died, obvs).

Rickie Lee Jones

, who I just saw in concert and who CRUSHED it. Stevie Wonder. My hilarious, life-loving 93-year-old dad. My friend Lee, who is 81 and who I play tennis with multiple times a week—he’s one of the most curious, fit, and delightful people I know. He reads a lot, not surprisingly. He’s incredibly generous. Also, he is kind of a hedonist.

What aging-related adjustments have you recently made, style-wise, beauty-wise, health-wise?

Have you read Rebeka Taussig’s book, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body? Can I quote from it, or is it supposed to feel more like we’re having a conversation? Okay, I’m going to: “The undeniable fact is that we all have bodies that make messes, fluctuate in size, cramp and bloat, rebel and disobey, break and heal, break again and heal all wonky, hurt and age, speak to us, work for us, get tired, grieve, and rejoice—but mainstream narratives tell us that our bodies aren’t that complex.”

Living inside this aging, menopausal body with its painful feet and malfunctioning brain and also getting diagnosed with a significant auto-immune illness—these are elements of aging for me that have reminded me of that point, Taussig’s, that disability is a spectrum we’re all on. Human bodies are fragile, fallible, vulnerable to illness and decrepitude. Wait. Is this an answer to that question? Maybe not!

Health-wise, I am trying to live in this body as it is, and take care of it with as much tenderness and joy as I can. This has meant starting, in the last few years: polar plunging, Zumba, playing tennis, and not drinking alcohol. Love, love, love, love. Also, no segue, I am less proud about wearing makeup. Sometimes I feel like a little color on my lips, cheeks, and eyelids makes me look better. I have really mixed feelings about that. Oh, also, because I want to have said it somewhere here: Vaginal estrogen! It has really stopped my vag from drying up and blowing away like a gynecological tumbleweed.

I’ve grown up listening to my dad muse about the disconnect at any given age between the number and how he feels, which has been helpful to me. A few years ago—he was probably 90 then—he described catching a glimpse of himself in a storefront and doing a total doubletake: “That old man is me?” It made us laugh, but it has also helped frame for us some of our own experiences of surprise, like when my husband and I accidentally qualified for a senior discount at the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. We were like: Us? Because we don’t feel the way our age sounds.

What’s an aging-related adjustment you refuse to make, and why?

I’m not sure if I’m proud and happy about aging, which is a posture I often assume, or whether I’m secretly kind of embarrassed about it? Probably both, given that usually we are required in life to hold multiple truths about every single fucking thing, oh my god. For example, my weight, which is like a menopause-themed game of Chutes and Ladders. “Turn 50: gain 5 pounds.” “Get diagnosed with an auto-immune illness: lose 5 pounds.” “Get plantar fasciitis and stop exercising: gain 5 pounds.” “Start taking a horrible chemotherapy drug: lose five pounds.” “Gain ten pounds for no discernible reason.” This is all approximate because I refuse to have a scale in the house.

But maybe I also refuse to relinquish pleasure, specifically pleasure in consumption, given that I’m not drinking. That means French fries and Nerds clusters and buttered popcorn with Frank’s Red Hot on it and also Jeni’s almond brittle ice cream and Fritos.

Unrelated: I haven’t done anything surgical or needle-injected to my (terrible) skin, but I have worn Frownies—those lick-and-stick paper patches—between my eyebrows every night for twenty years! It’s so embarrassing! But I feel happier if I don’t have those two deep, angry lines exclaiming to everyone about what an asshole I am.

I really enjoyed Catherine Newman’s latest novels, last year’s Sandwich, and Wreck, published this week, both of which feature the same family. I found them moving, insightful about life as a middle-aged woman, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.

What turn of events had the biggest impact on your life? What took your life in a different direction, for better or worse?

Gosh. Meeting Michael and having our exact kids—like getting pregnant in that exact second, with those exact eggs and sperm, ha ha ha, that’s so weird, but it is unfathomable that we could have not had these exact people in our lives. My best friend dying when we were in our 40s. Writing fiction turned out to be a big game-changer for me, and I didn’t really do it until I was 51. Quitting drinking, which I did nearly five-hundred days ago.

I love not drinking even more than I loved drinking, which is saying a lot. Every night I lie in bed not worrying about the terrible or stupid things I may have said or done. Every morning I open my eyes and feel wide awake, even though I have the worst insomnia. All day, I am in whatever moment I am in—not hurtling towards a future moment when I can finally crack open a beer again. I had to quit because of an auto-immune disease, and it feels worth it to have gotten the disease, just to be released from the jaws of this particular beast.

What is your number one regret in life? If you could do it all over again, what is the biggest thing you’d do differently?

I fucked up two long and important friendships by being overly demanding, impatient, difficult, unforgiving—one about 25 years ago, and then another more recently. I am a work in progress. I’m learning to hold multiple truths at once: I love this person; they have failed me; they are imperfect and matter a lot. If I had it to do over, I would ask more questions and react more slowly so that I wouldn’t just trample all over everything with my longing for something that feels like justice or love but is actually maybe just self-righteousness and bottomless pit of want.

My brilliant friend Lydia always says, if you’re struggling in a relationship, “Orient appropriately.” It means: Allow yourself to see, in the most clear-eyed way, who this person is and what they have to offer, and then nurture the boundaries and connections that match the situation as it is, not as you wish you were or as it would be if it were written in calligraphy on a sash that a Disney bluebird was draping around your magic shoulders. You can keep having imperfect people (aka everyone) in your life, but you’ll stop being hurt and disappointed over and over again.

What is high up on your “bucket list?” What do you hope to achieve, attain, or plain enjoy before you die?

My dad had these two things left on his bucket list: he wanted to live long enough to become something called a “diamond life master” at bridge, and he wanted to live long enough to celebrate his 60^th wedding anniversary with my mom. He accomplished both of these things this past year, very close together, and it made us all terrified that he was going to suddenly drop immediately dead. So I don’t think I want to do that to my kids, ha ha ha.

That said, I want to go to Ireland (my mother is half Irish). I want to swim in the fjords of Norway, ideally in winter. I want to go to Japan. (All this travel, though maybe I really just want to be home with the cats.) I’d like to learn to draw. I’d like to love my husband more patiently and dotingly. I’d like to watch the door hit Donald Trump while he’s on his way out.

Is there a piece of advice you were given, that you live by? If so, what was it, and who offered it to you?

Okay, this is incredibly specific, but it’s been very useful to me: when I was volunteering in my son’s fourth-grade classroom, I was stressing about this class potluck we were having, and I said to his teacher, in a stressed way, because of the stress, “Lots of people haven’t signed up for stuff. Would it help if I signed up to bring another dish?” and she smiled and shook her head, said, “It’s one meal. And we are all well-fed people.” And that has been a silent mantra for me ever since, especially when I’m making Thanksgiving dinner or something, stressing about the turkey, whatever: “We are all well-fed people.” I could always order pizza or serve eggs and toast.

Much, much more significantly and wide-rangingly, but a little more challenging to live out, my brilliant friend Lydia always says, if you’re struggling in a relationship, “Orient appropriately.” It means: Allow yourself to see, in the most clear-eyed way, who this person is and what they have to offer, and then nurture the boundaries and connections that match the situation as it is, not as you wish you were or as it would be if it were written in calligraphy on a sash that a Disney bluebird was draping around your magic shoulders. You can keep having imperfect people (aka everyone) in your life, but you’ll stop being hurt and disappointed over and over again.

“2017: Washington, D.C.”

What are your plans for your body when you’re done using it? Burial? Cremation? Body Farm? Other?

I suppose I picture getting cremated and flung out around the beaches and ponds of Cape Cod? But if the kids think of something else useful to do with my body—or even just something that will make them laugh, like taxidermy or using the ashes to coat an especially funky log of goat cheese—I would welcome them to do that instead. Also, asterisk: do I have too many massive old mercury fillings to be cremated without sending great plumes of toxic gas into the world? Probably!

My weight is like a menopause-themed game of Chutes and Ladders. “Turn 50: gain 5 pounds.” “Get diagnosed with an auto-immune illness: lose 5 pounds.” “Get plantar fasciitis and stop exercising: gain 5 pounds.” “Start taking a horrible chemotherapy drug: lose five pounds.” “Gain ten pounds for no discernible reason.” This is all approximate because I refuse to have a scale in the house.

How do you feel about dying? And what do you expect to happen to your “soul” or “spirit” after you die?

I feel bad about dying, ha ha ha! I’m the kind of person who has completely unresolved terror about eternity—like, it gives me total vertigo to think about it. I love everybody so much! Dying just feels like the ultimate, endless FOMO.

But then last night we were watching the last episode of the third season of the fantastic Reservation Dogs, and there’s a scene where someone helps a grieving someone (Willie Jack, if you know the show) by using a bag of chips (Flaming Flamers, if you know the show) as a prop for the lost person, showing how this person has given their chips—in the form of care, advice, knowledge—to all these other people, who now have that person in and with them, and this helped me a little actually. (Ed. note: OMG I loved that scene. 😭 - Sari)

What’s your philosophy on celebrating birthdays as an adult? How do you celebrate yours?

I like to celebrate my birthday by HURTING MY OWN FEELINGS! Ha ha ha. Just kidding, kind of. But I often seem to use my birthday as an excuse to complain about how imperfectly I’m loved? Which is ironic, given how perfectly loved I am.

The best best best birthday experiences I’ve had as an adult have all involved throwing myself a party where I cook dinner for my friends. I’m sure there’s some bigger philosophical kernel to be harvested from that—about getting by giving, the love you take is equal to the love you make, etc—but maybe I’m just a control freak.

Check out all the Oldster interviews…

Oldster Magazine explores what it means to travel through time in a human body, at every phase of life. It’s a reader-supported publication that pays contributors. To support this work, please become a paid subscriber. 🙏 Here’s a discount good until Saturday 11/1…