This is 81: Jon Carroll Responds to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire

"In my 30s I traveled to New York a great deal, met extremely interesting people, got hired for extremely interesting work, and ate a lot of good food. I covered an orgy for Esquire."

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.” (*The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire is exclusive to Oldster Magazine. ©Sari Botton)

Here, veteran author and editor Jon Carroll responds. -Sari Botton

PS If you’re enjoying the work I do here at Oldster, please consider supporting it by becoming a paid subscriber. 🙏

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Jon Carroll recently, “trying to look pensive.”

A native of Pasadena, California, Jon Carroll is an editor, writer, and columnist. He worked for Rolling Stone in its early days, helped found womenSports magazine with Billie Jean King, and won a National Magazine Award during his three years as editor of New West magazine. He also edited the short-lived countercultural fashion magazine Rags and the short-lived men’s magazine Oui. From 1982 to 2015 he was a daily columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle; a collection of his columns, Near-Life Experiences, was published in 1993. In 2008 he won the Ernie Pyle Award, given each year by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists to the writer who best exemplifies outstanding journalism in the tradition of the famed war correspondent. Jon has two daughters: Rachel Carroll, an executive assistant at the Kaiser Foundation; and Shana Carroll, one of the founders of 7 Doigts de la Main (The 7 Fingers), a Montréal-based circus company. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, Tracy Johnston, a photographer and the author of Shooting the Boh: A Woman’s Voyage Down the Wildest River in Borneo.

On Wednesday, July 2nd at 7pm, Jon Carroll will be in conversation with author Joanna Sokol at Green Apple Books/Books on the Park on 9th Avenue in San Francisco, for the release of Sokol’s book, A Real Emergency: Stories from the Ambulance.

(Thanks to Nancy Friedman for conducting this interview to accommodate for Jon Carroll’s vision problems.)

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How old are you?

81.

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

It’s an interesting question. I sometimes feel 17, which is a mixed blessing, and other times I feel 40, which is how old I was when my career was really taking off. I had just left New West and was writing a daily column for the San Francisco Chronicle. I’d been well known in publishing circles before then, but all of a sudden I was famous-famous. And it was very exciting.

High School graduation, 1961.

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

Physically, I feel just about my age. In every other way I feel younger and have been steadily feeling younger for the last four or five years. Things have gotten a lot simpler, and I feel as though I am able to meet decision points and deal with them in a sane and useful way. This was not true when I was 35, but it is now. I feel lighter—that’s really the word, although you associate “lighter” with youth. Except when my hip hurts, and then I feel exactly my age.

I sometimes feel 17, which is a mixed blessing, and other times I feel 40, which is how old I was when my career was really taking off. I had just left New West and was writing a daily column for the San Francisco Chronicle. I’d been well known in publishing circles before then, but all of a sudden I was famous-famous. And it was very exciting.

What do you like about being your age?

My elder daughter is two years shy of 60, and my younger daughter is 54. I like being old enough to follow the narrative of their lives. To see how they came out. You raise them, but if you die young you don’t get to see them become settled human beings with their sorrows and joys.

What is difficult about being your age?

I’m going blind. Around 2019 I was diagnosed with macular degeneration, which means that I am slowly and painlessly losing my sight. I had already stopped writing professionally when I got the diagnosis, and I’d also stopped publishing the blog, Jon Carroll Prose, that I had launched in December 2015. Now I can’t drive, and I can barely read. I get shots in my eyes every 10 weeks that slow the degeneration, but they won’t reverse the process.

On the positive side, Apple has wonderful accessibility options. I have a tablet that has very big type and I can sort of read it. I use voice-to-text technology for texting (it doesn’t work for email, alas), and I occasionally depend on the kindness of friends such as Nancy Friedman, who has helped me with this interview.

I can see my garden. I can see colors. I’ve always loved observing birds, and now, well, one of the things about birding that people don’t talk about is the sound. If you stand in the middle of the Sacramento Wildlife Refuge and cup your ears you hear a constantly changing cacophony.

What else is difficult? I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes about 30 years ago, and about 10 years ago I developed diabetic neuropathy, which means that my feet hurt all the time. When I first got the diabetes diagnosis I lost a whole bunch of weight. (I was told it would be a very good idea.) And I began exercising regularly. I mean, I’m someone who trekked in the Himalayas on my11-week honeymoon and backpacked in the Sierra Nevada, and I’ve done day hikes all over the fucking place. But becoming dedicated to it for health reasons was unusual. I joined a gym and began working with my first personal trainer. When she moved to Japan I found a new trainer, Tami, who comes to my house three times a week.

I’m going blind. Around 2019 I was diagnosed with macular degeneration, which means that I am slowly and painlessly losing my sight. I had already stopped writing professionally when I got the diagnosis, and I’d also stopped publishing the blog, Jon Carroll Prose, that I had launched in December 2015. Now I can’t drive, and I can barely read. I get shots in my eyes every 10 weeks that slow the degeneration, but they won’t reverse the process.

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

I sometimes notice that I am doing something the way an old man would do it. For instance—how many noises do I have to make to get out of my chair?

“I got this tattoo – my only one – after I had gone around the sun 75 times. It seemed like a milestone worth commemorating, and it seemed unlikely that I’d go around 100 times.”

What has aging given you? Taken away from you?

Aging has given me enormous peace of mind. Whenever you’re producing five newspaper columns a week for the public you are constantly aware that criticism, fair and unfair, will be leveled at you. It’s really hard to totally relax when that’s true. Also, now that my daughters are adults, we can have completely normal and useful conversations.

There are pleasures that it has taken away. Because of my feet my mobility is limited. I used to travel a great deal—seven continents in 20 years—and I haven’t been out of the U.S. since late June 2020, when Tracy and I went to Iceland. Yes, during the pandemic! There was no pandemic in Iceland; it had not reached those shores. We had to be tested at the airport, but still—nobody wore masks. We had planned it before the pandemic. It was a happy coincidence.

“In Argentina with capybaras, 2016.”

How has getting older affected your sense of yourself, or your identity?

It hasn’t, really. I am the same person inside as I always was—say, from age 12 or even earlier. I know more and I think more and I’m calmer, but other than that, same guy inside.

My mother—a Vassar graduate who worked as a secretary and raised me alone after she and my father divorced, when I was 3—hugely admired writers. She was a huge fan of The New Yorker and read the books reviewed there. I was allowed to read anything. And of course I became a writer. Writing was all I wanted to do, and I did it constantly. When I was 8, I put out the Chester Street News, which was a mimeographed broadsheet that I wrote every word of. Somebody’s niece is visiting from Omaha, someone is going to college, stuff like that. There was a children’s book series called Freddy the Pig, and I wrote my own Freddy the Pig story and I serialized it in the Chester Street News. When I was 14 I wrote some love poems to a girl. Somehow I got them back. Are they good? No. When you’re told as a 14-year-old to read E. E. Cummings, nothing good happens.

For my last three years of high school I was sent to the Webb School, a boarding school for boys in Claremont, California. My mother had grown up very rich and gone to boarding school herself, but had been disinherited when she married my father. After they divorced, and we had very little money, she thought it would be cool if I could get a scholarship, and I did. I edited the literary magazine and wrote for it. I wrote for the school annual, El Espejo.

There were famous writers on my father’s side. Dominick Dunne and John Gregory Dunne’s mother and my grandmother were sisters. I met cousin Nick Dominick—when I was 12; he was a studio executive and I got to spend a day wandering around the 20th Century Fox lot. I met John Gregory Dunne when I was maybe 15; he was married to Joan Didion by then, and they had a house in Trancas Canyon. I got no encouragement from either of them. I believe they thought my kind of writing was— well, they were terrible snobs, was the truth. But I appreciated them enough to hire both John and Joan to write regular columns for New West when I was the magazine’s editor.

There were famous writers on my father’s side. Dominick Dunne and John Gregory Dunne’s mother and my grandmother were sisters. I met cousin Nick—Dominick—when I was 12; he was a studio executive and I got to spend a day wandering around the 20th Century Fox lot. I met John Gregory Dunne when I was maybe 15; he was married to Joan Didion by then, and they had a house in Trancas Canyon. I got no encouragement from either of them. I believe they thought my kind of writing was— well, they were terrible snobs, was the truth. But I appreciated them enough to hire both John and Joan to write regular columns for New West when I was the magazine’s editor.

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?

There’s only one milestone left, isn’t there?

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

Other than my current age, I’d pick my middle to late 30s, when I traveled to New York a great deal, met extremely interesting people, got hired for extremely interesting work, and ate a lot of good food. I covered an orgy for Esquire. When I worked for Rags I did a 3,000-word story on New York boutiques and what they were going through in hard times. I knew nothing about boutiques, nothing about fashion, and nothing about running a business. I was the perfect candidate for that story.

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

My friend Brian Wall, a sculptor here in the Bay Area, continues to work at age 94 even though he too has macular degeneration. He’s doing drawings too.

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

I think I’ve grown old pretty well. For 81 I think I look pretty good. I don’t think I was attractive at 40. I always thought it was my wit and charm rather than my looks that accounted for my success with the ladies.

“With Santa Claus in Antarctica, 1995. Not pictured: about eight zillion penguins.”

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

I refuse to vegetate, to lose interest in things, to let my curiosity atrophy. It’s a danger that we all face. It’s not an unreal temptation. How do you fight it? You talk. You think. You speculate. My granddaughter, who is 23, comes over here to hang out, not because we asked her to help but because she enjoys it. We play cribbage and talk about horses.

Here’s a thing a lot of old people are privately thinking: I’m really glad I’m not going to be around to see what 2050 will look like. I fear for my grandchildren. Our politics is controlled by billionaire boys who are enthusiastically letting the planet go to shit. I’m afraid the results of this little experiment in fascism will be sad. My granddaughter’s generation is the first that will do less well than their parents.

I think I’ve grown old pretty well. For 81 I think I look pretty good. I don’t think I was attractive at 40. I always thought it was my wit and charm rather than my looks that accounted for my success with the ladies.

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

Getting together with my wife Tracy. I was assigning stories for the Village Voice, looking for writers on the West Coast. Tracy was just out of Berkeley’s journalism school. She pitched me a story about the photographer Judy Dater, which the Voice published. We’ve been married since September 1981.

Left: On our honeymoon trek in the Himalayas, 1981. At this point we are about a day’s hike from my highest camp (16,500 feet).Right: Tracy and me at the Hayes Street Grill in San Francisco beneath a portrait of my much younger self, 2025.

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 wish someone had taught me how to manage people professionally. Personnel is the hardest part of being a boss. At all four magazines I edited, I was thrown into that water totally unprepared. I knew how to write and edit magazines but I did not know how to manage people. There was some stupidity. There were hurt feelings.

I don’t really regret dropping out of college. I did two and a half years, but I was much too cranked up on hormones and ambition to get much out of it. I wish that the societal norm was taking four years off to go to college starting at age 40.

Order the book…

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

I’d like to find a way to get my prose in front of an audience again. I think it’s important that everyone who has a voice should use it.

I published my blog for about two years, and stopped because I couldn’t think of anything original to say about Donald Trump. And I kind of got tired of myself. It’s a job that encourages narcissism and I did not need any encouragement.

Now, though, I have ideas that I have not seen expressed, and I want to express them. And if I can figure out the adaptive technology, I will.

Here’s a thing a lot of old people are privately thinking: I’m really glad I’m not going to be around to see what 2050 will look like. I fear for my grandchildren. Our politics is controlled by billionaire boys who are enthusiastically letting the planet go to shit. I’m afraid the results of this little experiment in fascism will be sad. My granddaughter’s generation is the first that will do less well than their parents.

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

“Show up, pay attention, tell the truth.” It was said at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting—not to me personally, but to the group—by someone I did not know well.

“Accepting the Ernie Pyle award [in 2008]. I cried during the speech, although I can’t remember why.”

What are your plans for your body when you’re done using it? Burial? Cremation? Body Farm? Other? And what do you expect to happen to your “soul” or “spirit” after you die?

We are going to be interred in some kind of biodegradable sack on a hillside in Marin County.

I absolutely do not believe in any supernatural hoo-ha. I believe I’m just a bunch of neurons arranged in a certain way, and when it goes away it goes away.

I wish someone had taught me how to manage people professionally. Personnel is the hardest part of being a boss. At all four magazines I edited, I was thrown into that water totally unprepared. I knew how to write and edit magazines but I did not know how to manage people. There was some stupidity. There were hurt feelings.

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

There’s a group of six friends who get together for each of our birthdays throughout the year. In general we eat dinner and talk. Last year, for my 81st, I did a grandiose thing and had family and friends come up to the Sacramento Wildlife Refuge and spend the night.

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*The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire is exclusive to Oldster Magazine. ©Sari Botton