Reviews for Am I Old Yet?: A True Story of a Timeless Friendship

The average rating for Am I Old Yet?: A True Story of a Timeless Friendship based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-12-25 00:00:00 Peter Philpott This is the perfect book to keep score on. On Christmas, we played Yahtzee in the living room, rattling the dice in a cup and throwing them onto a wooden tray. Someone passed around books for us to hold in our laps and use as a hard surface for our score sheets. With six people playing, it took a long time for it to be my turn, so I flipped through this book in the interim. Watching people roll dice would be a better use of your time. I took an instant dislike to Komaiko, the narrator of this memoir story about a woman who thinks she is old. She meets a woman who is actually old. And I guess a book happens. I didn't get that far. The big red stamp on the book's first page -- WITHDRAWN FEB 2006 -- should have been clue. The library couldn't give this book away for free, so they chucked it. The book opens with an anecdote of pure nonsense. (The whole book is likely 190 pages of nonsense.) First lines: "To begin with, I was not aging graciously. Not that I ever had." It's the night of the moon landing (or Kubrick's facsimile, who knows?) Neil Armstrong says his famous spiel, and our narrator wails, "I'm old. I'm seventeen!" The moon landing is all about her. On the next page, she says, "I finally reached a point of peace one night during puberty when I decided I would believe in God's goodness if He could perform two miracles." One is liposuction, the other is living until 105, but having the body and brain of a 25-year-old. Speaking of God: Goddamn, this woman is shallow. She says thirty years after making this wish, she was 44 and living in Los Angeles. Let's do some math. She has her age crisis during the moon landing at seventeen. But she "finally" reaches a point of peace... when she's fourteen. She has discovered the secret to eternal youth! She's already living backwards! Like Benjamin Button. Oh wait, that has already been done, and would be more interesting. She continues whining and being a self-entitled Baby Boomer, aka, the reason for every problem we have on this planet right now -- low wages, climate change, poor education, etc. I stabbed my Yahtzee pencil through a few pages. I read enough to see the narrator volunteer to spend time with an old woman, who I guess will teach her valuable life lessons. "She'll probably die at the end," my friend said. I flipped to the last page. "No matter how old a person is, if she has love in her life, there is only one age--alive." No, the old woman isn't dead, but the narrator still seems incapable of any sort of deep thought. So I tore a few pages of the book in half (I'd been drinking) and went back to playing Yahtzee. The dice clattered across the little tray once, twice, three times. No full house. No four of a kind. I needed to put my score in the wild-card space, which is called Chance, like my name. My bad Yahtzee joke (are there good Yahtzee jokes?) was to say, "That's my age!" every time someone fills in Chance, whether they rolled a 12 or a 29. Sometimes it was true; it was my age. But two years ago, I became too old for that joke to ever be a true statement again. The dice can never roll a number that high. I filled in the blank. I kept my joke to myself. It, too, had gotten old. The dice rolled on.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-04-30 00:00:00 Franck Chaumeil Baby-boomer and children’s author Leah Komaiko was convinced that she was washed up and hung out to dry at age 44: “Now I was older. To sleep, I had to have a choice of heating pads (steam or dry for back pain), a night neck collar, lavender aromatherapy, valerian root, calcium magnesium and vitamin D to ward off osteoporosis, and a fan or air conditioner running twelve months a year to block out the noise from my neighbor’s barking dogs...” After deciding that a matchmaking service wasn’t the answer to her low spirits, Leah considered a different type of match—she signed up to be a volunteer with the Elder Corps and was matched with a senior. When Leah met her match, blind 93-year-old Adele, she thought that she’d made a mistake. Adele was Leah’s least favorite kind of old lady: “brash, independent, with the sensitivity of a lout, who needed to be the center of attention, and who thought she could say whatever she wanted to say and get away with it because she was old.” Somehow Leah managed to stick with her match and she ended up spending many more hours with Adele each week than the one hour she had committed to serving. Although they were tentative acquaintances at first, their relationship evolved into a true friendship, despite the 50-year difference in their ages. This merry and moving memoir is recommended for anyone who wants an intriguing look at aging.