Stupid Things I Won’t Do When I Get Old

It began as a New York Times essay and it began as judgment. You won’t have to shout at me that I’m deaf. I won’t blame the family dog for my incontinence. The subtitle is honest about the register, and it is a register that gets less comfortable as you read on.

Petrow is an award-winning journalist who has written on aging, health, and LGBTQ issues for the Times and the Washington Post, and the book grew from a column that got an enormous response.

The structure is three parts: things he won’t do today, things he won’t do tomorrow, and things he won’t do at the end. Forty-three short essays plus a foreword and an epilogue.

How did the book change while he was writing Stupid Things I Won’t Do When I Get Old?

This is the most interesting thing about it and it happened to the author instead of being designed.

The first section is the weakest and is the one people quote. It is a snarky catalog by an adult child watching parents make choices he cannot influence: refusing to get a hearing test, lying about their age, lying to their doctor, holding on to a house nobody can maintain. There is real frustration in it and it has not yet become anything else.

Then his father declined, his mother developed dementia, and both of them died. What was a list of criticisms turns into a set of instructions to himself, and the tone changes without the book announcing it.

You can watch it happen across the sections, which is unusual. Most books get edited into a consistent voice. This one keeps the seam, and the seam is where the value is.

What is in the last section?

The third part is where it becomes a good book, and the titles do most of the work.

Not dying without somebody holding your hand. Not letting anything stop you saying you love someone and saying goodbye. Writing letters to the people you leave. Being clear about what you want in your obituary, which sounds morbid and is a kindness to whoever has to write it.

And clearing out your house so that somebody else does not have to do it while grieving. That last one is practical advice disguised as sentiment, and it is correct. Anybody who has emptied a parent’s house knows it is a task performed at the worst possible moment by the least capable version of yourself, in a building full of objects that each require a decision.

What does Stupid Things I Won’t Do When I Get Old get wrong?

The prose is light, and the publisher’s comparison to David Sedaris and Nora Ephron sets an expectation the writing does not meet. It is competent journalism arranged in short pieces and it is not stylish.

The first section is also the part most often quoted from it, which is unfortunate, because it is the least interesting and it gives readers a wrong impression of what the book becomes.

And some essays are thin. Forty-three pieces is a lot to fill, and a few of them make one small point and stop, which reads as padding in a book that elsewhere earns its length.

When should you read Stupid Things I Won’t Do When I Get Old?

Before you need it, which is the difficulty with the entire category.

The publisher pitches it at readers over fifty-five. The practical material, particularly on paperwork, on the house, and on saying things to people while they can still hear them, is more useful the earlier you meet it.

It is also worth reading if you are currently watching a parent age, and it will be uncomfortable, because the first section is precisely the position you are in and Petrow is not flattering about it. That discomfort is the point and he arrives at it before the reader does.

Verdict

Lightweight prose and a heavier book than it looks. Push past the judgmental opening, which the author himself grew out of during the writing, and the last third is worth the whole thing.

Best read before you need it, which is the difficulty with the entire category and is not a reason to wait.

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