ABSTRACT
The author brings together threads of research through a partially autoethnographic narrative that examines the embodiment of aging. By exploring her own experiences along with the stories of older women artists, she examines how one’s identity unfolds over a lifelong trajectory. The stories she collects come from the vantage point of the artists’ mature years, retrospectively creating her story, from a present viewpoint and projecting forward. Reflecting ethnographically on the contemporary reality of older adulthood demonstrates that older years bring back a new level of identity crisis, a challenging need for intimacy but also solitude, and a new dimension of creative generativity.
