Mita Banerjee: Centenarians’ Autobiographies: Age, Life Writing and the Enigma of Extreme Longevity

Mita Banerjee’s Centenarians’ Autobiographies: Age, Life Writing and the Enigma of Extreme Longevity focuses on a unique genre of autobiographies written by or about individuals who have reached the age of one hundred. Banerjee examines eight such centenarian autobiographies more closely, all of which are authored by African-American centenarians, seven of whom have younger co-authors (most of them white). Banerjee convincingly argues and illustrates that these specific narratives, at the intersection of race and age, are particularly apt to offer significant insights into current cultural perceptions of “aging successfully.” Moreover, she traces and critiques a recurring “colorblindness” in these works. While the narratives do address race, the focus on successful aging promotes notions of resilience that tie intimately into the American myth of “rugged individualism,” proclaiming, for example, that one can reach the age of one hundred without “ever having seen a doctor” (175). This individualistic focus consequently precludes any critique of racism or systemic social injustice, such as unequal access to health care.

As part of her analysis of the intersections of race and age in these autobiographies, Banerjee inquires into the ethics and mechanics of their co-authorship. The narratives often stylize the (white) co-authors as “family” emphasizing the bond between the centenarians and co-authors, who, as “surrogate children,” receive advice on how to “live into extreme old age and pass away peacefully and without fear” (304). The analysis poses the question to what extent centenarians might thus become instrumentalized as what Toni Morrison calls “serviceable figures,” who help to calm “a white public’s deepest fears” (37) about aging, while obfuscating both social inequalities and ways of aging deemed unsuccessful. Reading the narratives closely “with the grain and against the grain,” Banerjee’s stated goal is to “examine both what is being said and what goes unsaid” (11). In her analysis, which is structured into eight thematic chapters, she skillfully brings together and thus shows pertinent intersections of aging studies, autobiography, the life sciences, medical humanities, disability studies, and critical race theory.

The introduction contextualizes centenarians’ autobiographies as emblematic of the concept of successful aging, popularized by gerontologists John Rowe and Robert Kahn in 1997. Originally intended to juxtapose the ubiquitous view of aging solely in terms of decline, “successful aging” quickly became a new master narrative of aging. However, this master narrative’s emphasis on the individual’s agency to achieve continued fulfillment works hand in hand with neoliberal ideals of individual responsibility, which effectively marginalizes those who do not fit its parameters, such as persons living with disability or chronic illness, and obscures the need for systemic changes concerning health care or social inequalities. Chapters 2 and 3 further pinpoint the considerable overlap of the centenarian autobiographies with the life sciences’ interest in extreme longevity. On the surface, this interest appears to be linked to celebrating the achievement of healthy and happy longevity, but frequently the celebration points more to the aspirations of younger people to gain access to an imitable recipe for successful aging. Unsurprisingly then, those centenarians’ autobiographies that succeed on the book market are ones that find willing subjects who agree that reaching one hundred is in fact a personal achievement and hence, “subscribe to the tenet of successful aging” (73). The fact that the life narrative of a centenarian becomes interesting based on this achievement of age, which turns them from “nobody” into “somebody” (83), is further illuminated in Chapter 4. This chapter focuses on the “recruitment” of the centenarians to tell their stories by (white) co-authors and the framing of these co-authors within the work, in ways that heighten rather than detract from the authenticity that is characteristically expected from life-writing.

Chapter 5 taps back into the promise of a solvable enigma of successful longevity, analyzing the genre as advice literature, which formulaically promises to reveal the secrets of happy and healthy longevity, whether in the minute accounting for daily routines, nutrition, or religious beliefs. Here again, Banerjee, analyzing representative passages, shows that while these narratives serve as tributes to the centenarians’ lives and collect many charming stories, they time and again obscure, if not outright deny, systemic factors such as the role of poverty in playing a role regarding nutrition, exercise, and adequate healthcare. Chapters 6 to 9 return to a more in-depth examination of the ethics of co-authorship and the function of the (white) co-author as a proxy for a (in many cases white) readership. Since the centenarians’ autobiographies that Banerjee analyses are as-told-to autobiographies (157), questions of what Thomas Couser calls “vulnerable subjects” become significant. The narratives take pains to emphasize authenticity, the consent given by the centenarian, and the familiar bond between author and co-author, yet existing hierarchies, such as the fact that (economic) benefits in some cases seem to lie largely with the co-author (247), are obscured. Banerjee also traces the ethnographic aspect of these works, which can turn the “country of extreme old age” (226) into a form of touristic experience for the readership that alludes to familiar tropes of “vanishing” (233) and out-of-timeness. In many cases, such tropes risk sidelining the agency of the centenarian and relegating their story, told for the “common good” (225), into serviceable presences.

Centenarians’ Autobiographies illustrates not only the advantages but also the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach that brings the life sciences and cultural studies together when it comes to understanding current imaginaries of successful aging. It illustrates that a sharp focus on a presumably niche genre in literature – centenarian autobiographies – illuminates a much wider set of convictions, anxieties, and hopes about Western cultural imaginaries of aging. The work thus impressively illustrates a core mantra of critical age studies: older age does not just concern older persons. How we understand and imagine aging essentially offers insights into how a society imagines the good life, and who is excluded from it. While these autobiographies can in many instances be read as “narratives of self-empowerment” (177) that negate apocalyptic and alarmist rhetoric about aging, aging, they also emphasize the neoliberal logic of the fit body and mind as individual capital. This perspective risks creating a category of the “worthy” old, who must constantly prove their civic fitness to show they will not burden society (173).

Critical age studies were born from the necessity to juxtapose reductive negative models of aging as inevitable physical and mental decline. What Banerjee’s work shows, however, is that while we might generally applaud narratives that celebrate growing older, it is still necessary to ask what narratives become obscured by the sudden spotlight on the specific achievement of reaching age one hundred in good health. With her focus on the intersection of age and race, Banerjee’s work makes a crucial contribution to critical age studies which (in Europe and North America) is still an overly white discipline with an overly white focus. The book is equally relevant for scholars and students in life writing studies, as it traces the intricacies of co-authorship, potentially vulnerable subjects, and underlying neoliberal norms of what books are marketable. While Centenarians’ Autobiographies is primarily aimed at scholars and students working in these fields, it is also very accessibly written, introducing and defining its terms and concepts without ever becoming unwieldy in the process. In this way, it is also a work suited to catch the interest of a broader audience curious about autobiographical writing and/or representations of aging.

Given that Banerjee locates the specific centenarian autobiographies of her study as part of a global fascination with longevity, some comparative information about white American-, POC- or non-American Black centenarian autobiographies, would have helped to integrate the astute analysis of race and age in those eight works into a larger context. Likely, however, this would have easily superseded the available space of the volume, as well as the research capacity of one author. Hopefully, others will continue to critically study narratives of longevity from intersectional and interdisciplinary perspectives.