{"id":15026,"date":"2021-02-07T12:51:28","date_gmt":"2021-02-07T20:51:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.3rdactmagazine.com\/?p=15026"},"modified":"2022-08-16T23:02:57","modified_gmt":"2022-08-17T06:02:57","slug":"my-last-eight-thousand-days-an-american-male-in-his-seventies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3rdactmagazine.com\/my-last-eight-thousand-days-an-american-male-in-his-seventies\/uncategorized\/","title":{"rendered":"My Last Eight Thousand Days: An American Male in His Seventies"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Lee Gutkind<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Ann Hedreen<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Book<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you hit rock bottom, dig farther down. Grief is the seed of singing, shame the seed of song,\u201d wrote Kim Stafford in his poem titled \u201cCitizen of Dark Times.\u201d During this pandemic year, I have gone back to Stafford\u2019s poem many times, and I thought of it as I read Lee Gutkind\u2019s memoir, My Last Eight Thousand Days: An American Male in his Seventies<\/em>.<\/p>\n

When Gutkind hit rock bottom, he started digging. He found grief, he found shame, and he found a way to understand his own life story.<\/p>\n

Gutkind, the founder of Creative Nonfiction<\/em> magazine, has written more than a dozen nonfiction books on subjects ranging from motorcycle culture to organ transplantation. He taught creative nonfiction for many years at the University of Pittsburgh and is now a professor and writer-in-residence at Arizona State University. In My Last Eight Thousand Days, <\/em>he finally turns his storytelling skills on himself: not to catalog his achievements, but to probe his own intense discomfort with aging.<\/p>\n

Gutkind begins his story on the morning of his seventieth birthday, with the blare of his alarm clock at 5:30 a.m. Things have not been going well lately, he tells us. His mother, to whom he was very close, died five days before his birthday, two of his best friends died not long before that, and his decade-long romantic relationship just ended. But that\u2019s not all. The premise of his latest book project, which he had been researching and writing for five years, had abruptly fallen apart when his hero-subject was exposed as a fraud. And just to ice the cake, he\u2019d been putting on weight.<\/p>\n

After the first chapter, I thought: Is this what I need to read right now? In the middle of the pandemic?<\/p>\n

But Gutkind\u2019s deadpan, self-deprecating, dark sense of humor began to grow on me: precisely because, as he wrote this book between his other projects and over the course of five years, it began to grow on him. He realized that he was learning not to take himself so seriously, and as he did, he became not only more comfortable in his own skin, but more likable: as a narrator, a character, and, to his own wonderment, as a human being interacting with other human beings.<\/p>\n

The title comes from an article Gutkind came across by Joe Coughlin, the director of MIT\u2019s AgeLab<\/a>, in which Coughlin posits that our lives can be roughly divided into chunks of eight thousand days: from birth to 21; from 21 into your forties; from there to sixty-five. And if you make it past 65, \u201cthere\u2019s a 50 percent chance that you will live to eighty-five. Or another eight thousand days, more or less.\u201d Gutkind, who just turned 76, is well on his way to claiming that lucky eight-thousand-day bonus.<\/p>\n

He is grateful. But he is also aware that, like the people he profiled in Many Sleepless Nights: The World of Organ Transplantation, <\/em>\u201cmy reassuring disconnection, my safety zone, is evaporating. Not because of an organ diseased or out of whack, but simply because of wear and tear on what was then my pretty goddamn healthy body and my good fortune. In a way, and I realize I am being self-centered about this, I am facing now, or will soon be facing, what my subjects were confronting then. Gradually decreasing health, cognitively and physically, and the frustration and fear of isolation and irrelevance that comes with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Gutkind examines his past\u2014from being the \u201cfat kid\u201d picked last for every team to his failed marriages to how he became a devoted practitioner and teacher of the art of writing creative nonfiction\u2014and as he weaves in riffs on his current losses and creeping loneliness, we witness a gradual transformation of his views on aging. He realizes that being the artistic loner he has always imagined himself to be\u2014back when he had the emotional support of his mother, wives, and best friends\u2014is no longer going to work, now that they\u2019re gone. He needs to make new friends. He needs to figure out how to do that. It\u2019s humbling. But it turns out to be\u2026 fun. Who knew? And important. And I won\u2019t say more, because it was my favorite part of the book and I don\u2019t want to spoil it for you. But I will quote Gutkind\u2019s final description of himself: \u201can aging man, but not an old man; a vital man, not a defeated or tired man\u2026 I am not the old Lee Gutkind anymore; I am, rather, the new, albeit older, me.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Lee Gutkind Reviewed by Ann Hedreen \u201cWhen you hit rock bottom, dig farther down. Grief is the seed of singing, shame the seed of song,\u201d wrote Kim Stafford inMore<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMy Last Eight Thousand Days: An American Male in His Seventies — 3rd Act Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/3rdactmagazine.com\/my-last-eight-thousand-days-an-american-male-in-his-seventies\/uncategorized\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"My Last Eight Thousand Days: An American Male in His Seventies\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By Lee Gutkind Reviewed by Ann Hedreen \u201cWhen you hit rock bottom, dig farther down. 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