I'm Too Young to Be Seventy: And Other Delusions »

Judith Viorst was born and brought up in New Jersey, graduated from Rutgers University, moved to Greenwich Village, and has lived in Washington, D.C., since 1960, when she married Milton Viorst, a political writer. They have three sons—Anthony and Nick (who are lawyers) and Alexander (who does community-development lending for a bank) and seven grandchildren—Miranda, Brandeis, Olivia, Nathaniel, Benjamin, Isaac, and Toby.

Fans of Judith Viorst's funny, touching, and wise poems about turning thirty, forty, fifty, and sixty will love this new volume for the woman who deeply believes she is too young to be seventy, "too young in my heart and my soul, if not in my thighs."

Viorst explores, among the many other issues of this stage of life, the state of our sex lives and teeth, how we can stay married though thermostatically incompatible, and the joys of grandparenthood and shopping. Readers will nod with rueful recognition when she asks, "Am I required to think of myself as a basically shallow woman because I feel better when my hair looks good?," when she presses a few helpful suggestions on her kids because "they may be middle aged, but they're still my children," and when she graciously — but not too graciously — selects her husband's next mate in a poem deliciously subtitled "If I Should Die Before I Wake, Here's the Wife You Next Should Take." Though Viorst acknowledges she is definitely not a good sport about the fact that she is mortal, her poems are full of the pleasures of life right now, helping us come to terms with the passage of time, encouraging us to keep trying to fix the world, and inviting us to consider "drinking wine, making love, laughing hard, caring hard, and learning a new trick or two as part of our job description at seventy."

I'm Too Young to Be Seventy is a joy to read and makes a heartwarming gift for anyone who has reached or is soon to reach that — it'snot so bad after all — seventh decade.

Contents

At Seventy

At Seventy

Erotic Options

Teeth

Hmmm

Re: Vision

As Time Goes By

Soul-Searching

Still Married

The Secret of Staying Married

Not Merely His Life Companion

Body Heat

Why Marriage Was Invented

At the Opera

In the Middle of the Night

Some of the Reasons I Love to Go to the Movies

To My Husband When He Starts Contemplating Remarriage or If I Should Die Before I Wake, Here's the Wife You Next Should Take

The Children and Grandchildren

They May Be Middle Aged, But They're Still My Children

Granddaughter

New Kid Around the House

Namesakes

A Letter to My Sons About Mother's Day

What Do We Tell the Children?

Role Reversal

The Sixth Grandchild

The Rest of It

Nervous

Too Young to Be Seventy

Keynesian Economics

If We Stopped Trying

On Not Being a Good Sport About the Fact That I'm Going to Die One of These Days

At the Airport

Still Dieting After All These Years

The Rest of It