Beauty Betrays Us
Susan Johnson - photo by Simon Schluter
How we feel about the ageing process is rarely the hot topic shared spontaneously over coffee. It’s a bit like broaching the subject of sex
at a dinner party 60 years ago. Absolutely taboo. However, I found this insightful passage by author Susan Johnson in On Beauty, one of the “Little Books on Big Themes’’ published by Melbourne University Pressin 2009, which captures her thoughts on ageing.
“Now of course I have grown old, or at least beyond the moment when a woman’s beauty is supposed to matter. I have arrived at the precipice, between middle age and old age, not yet one of Helen Garner’s women in The Spare Room, women in their sixties who have learnt to avert their eyes from their own reflections.
Rather, I am at that moment when I am compulsively drawn to mirrors, to watch age break across the surface of my face. I am 52 years old and the face I have had all my adult life is leaving, moment by moment. The disintegration of my features is both fascinating and terrifying and for the first time I can see that ageing is like something breaking up, like watching a well-known object crack into a million pieces before your eyes.’’
Susan Johnson has written six novels and a memoir. She lives in London where she is working on a seventh novel, My Hundred Lovers.
age & aphrodite, my journal | nadine 03/12/2010 | 
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