Aging Out by Lucy Schiller

AGING OUT by Lucy Schiller is subtitled “An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old,” but it seems to be more of an internal evaluation expressed in a series of essays. Schiller, a non-fiction writing professor at Texas Tech, begins by talking about a move to Pittsburgh after leaving a job in Germany and living with Mary Ann, her grandmother, for a bit during COVID. And then she reflects on her other grandmother, Anita, who died from COVID. Eventually, Schiller starts to quote industry statistics for senior living facilities, but it feels really negative. She herself says, “From my pink couch in Pittsburgh, I read this hodgepodge of age-fear, the sunlight slanting down through the dark wood windows.” She makes a very valid point that “there is no class you take, at any point in your life, alongside everyone else, in which you learn such facts. Perhaps it is because there are so many options, instead of a few or even more simply, one. …. perhaps you wonder how to make sense of all these pieces of some larger puzzle whose shape, and picture, you can't see.”  Does she help answer those questions? Again, not really, even though she supplies data points like “The median cost, nationally, of a semiprivate room in a nursing home in 2025 is around $110,000.” Information is buried in the text (e.g., she describes Papa, a private company worth more than a billion which offers elder companions on demand), but those details are not easily accessible and certainly not very action oriented. This was a missed opportunity to give direction on how to gather information and make choices from an author who had obviously researched the topic. Approximately twenty percent of the preview was devoted to a Notes section but unlike so many other texts about aging, there was no helpful list of resources, government agencies, or relevant websites. Publishers Weekly gave AGING OUT a starred review, commenting “It’s a deeply human portrayal of what it means to get older in a society unprepared to care for its most vulnerable.”