How to Age Gracefully

For readers curious about life in assisted living facilities comes a collection of essays that break stereotypes and distill vital lessons from people in later life.

A thoughtful and poignant meditation on aging and mortality, How to Age Gracefully tells the story of author Barbara Scoblic’s life inside an assisted living facility through essays and conversations.

When she entered an assisted living facility in Bethesda, Maryland, at age eighty-three, journalist and memoirist Scoblic wasn’t expecting to find such rich subject matter. But the residents and staff surprised her with their kindness, wisdom, and sometimes wicked sense of humor—and inspired her to begin taking notes on their conversations, both those she was a part of and those she overheard. The pieces in this collection, which consider grief, the occasional indignities of living in an aging body, the importance of friendship and community, and the surprising ways we can grow more creative as we grow older, are born of Scoblic’s observations and experiences of life in assisted living. The resulting work is essential for anyone entering the later years of life—or anyone who intends to.

Barbara Hoffbeck Scoblic found her lifelong themes in rural South Dakota, where she grew up on a small farm, the youngest of seven children. From earliest childhood, she was alert to the beauties and vagaries of the natural world; she also, however, grappled with a growing impatience to see what was beyond the farm. As a young woman, her drive to break free took her first to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand, then travels throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Greece. Back in the States, she described her experiences in a series for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Her first memoir, Lost Without the River, was published by She Writes Press many years later, in 2019. A longtime resident of Manhattan, Scoblic now lives in a senior independent living facility in Bethesda, Maryland.