Review: Medicare sucks. Caregiving is hard. Too bad the pain of aging feels like old news in new memoir

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Set us as preferred Freelance writer and editor Lucy Schiller bumped up against the issues of aging, eldercare and loneliness through her grandmothers.When the family pulled her maternal grandmother, Mary Ann, from assisted living during the pandemic, Schiller became her primary caregiver.

Her paternal grandmother, Anita, was less fortunate; she contracted COVID-19 from a home healthcare aide and died in a hospital.Book ReviewAging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow OldBy Lucy Schiller Flatiron Books: 272 pages, $30If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.As she relates in “Aging Out,” the shock of Anita’s death was a factor in Schiller’s abrupt relocation from a central New York college town to Pittsburgh, where she knew no one.Schiller calls the move “a half-desperate plan to simply change the background scenery of my life for the millionth time.”While grieving, scrambling to make a living, taking long walks with her dog and wrestling with her chosen solitude, Schiller embarks on a quest to understand the institutions and attitudes that shape old age in America.

“What was the relationship between personal fear of oldness and the ways in which oldness was structured in society?” she asks.The resulting book, a deliberately meandering account of her Steel City sojourn, weds memoir, travelogue, philosophical rumination and journalistic investigation.Schiller, an MFA graduate of the University of Iowa and now an assistant professor of nonfiction at Texas Tech University, is a fluid writer.

But most of what she covers is well-trod ground.It’s worth asking whom she envisions as her audience.Most older readers know this territory; younger ones have other, more pressing concerns, including h...