See the old ladies decently: 'Ageing and Embodiment in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Life, End Of.'

Ageing is, as Simone de Beauvoir reminds us in Old Age (La Vieillesse), the most inevitable of all bodily processes. If fortunate, we will all become part of this second existence. An increasingly radically altered life, ageing entails a phenomenological transubstantiation wherein we enter a new mode of subjectivity, lived perforce, in closer proximity to death and its harbingers: illness, infirmity and disquiet. However, there is argues, de Beauvoir a “conspiracy of silence” around old age, that renders the older self unseemly and inessential to the world. An experimental autofiction Christine Brooke Rose’s last work, Life, End Of (2006), is a corrective to the depreciating discourses that depict older age as a life-stage wholly characterised by decline and dependency.