Overview

A diary of the emotional impact of selling most of your things and moving into a retirement community. In 2023, 18% of the U.S. population is 65 and older. This is us, my husband and me. Way over. Many of us have considered whether we want to radically upend our lives, get rid of most of our beloved possessions, and move into a place that does many things for us. How would that be? You've given up your job, now you're contemplating giving up the rest of your previous identity and moving in with a bunch of old people. Really? When my husband and I made this move, it was not from immediate need. It was anticipating that need. My husband's back was getting worse. We chose to make our life easier. We were asked by many friends what it was like, living in a senior retirement facility. I had no idea how life-wrenching the move would be. I started keeping a diary because I'm a writer; this is what I do.

Full Product Details

9781968761271

Table of Contents

Reviews

""These wise, searching, eloquently frank dispatches from The Club read like notes from a dauntless arctic explorer who is also a marvelous poet. Within her strange new world, Fleda Brown finds herself questioning everything-especially her assumptions about 'retirement communities'-remaining so warily attentive to the surprising pleasures and difficulties she encounters that each entry shimmers with possibility. This is an exhilarating book."" -Suzanne Berne, author of The Blue Window, winner of Women's Prize for Fiction ""In this luminous meditation, Fleda Brown's speaker maps the small, radiant rituals of aging, bringing the seemingly quotidian of fitness classes, Qigong, and pots of coffee on the warmer, into the realm of holy hymn. With the speaker we observe the living and the leaving, the saints of maintenance, and the ghosts of former selves. Her beautiful lyrical language circles like birds above the snow-heavy roofs of northern Michigan. Part elegy, part diary, The End-of-the-Line Club speaks in the quiet astonishment of one who has arranged and rearranged her life until it gleams."" -Oliver de la Paz, author of The Diaspora Sonnets, winner of the New England Book Award for Poetry ""How lucky are we to be offered these intimate glimpses into the mind of Fleda Brown? Always the clear-eyed observer of both interior and exterior lives, Brown now takes us behind the scenes of the retirement home she moves into with her husband, finding new forms of camaraderie along the way. Carried along by Brown's wry humor and keen observations, we learn what it really means to go through the human transitions we both expect and deny. 'This diary, ' she writes, 'was my way of keeping my spirit attached to my body when all else felt in motion.' What emerges is an honest, often funny, and deeply moving portrait of aging with as much grace as one can muster."" -Brenda Miller, author of An Earlier Life

Author Information

Fleda Brown's twelfth collection of poems, The End of the Clockwork Universe, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2025. Flying Through a Hole in the Storm (2021) won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize from Ohio University Press and was an Indie finalist. Doctor of the World won the Finishing Line chapbook contest and was published in March 2025. Earlier poems can be found in The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems (University of Nebraska Press). Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her recent memoir is Mortality, with Friends (Wayne State University Press, an MiPA Winner and Midwest Book Award winner in memoir). She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07. She lives in Traverse City, Michigan, with her husband, Jerry Beasley, not far from their lake cottage. https: //catrinwelzstein.com/

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