Introduction

This foundational chapter connects the aging woman to the image of God in the work of several late American women writers, including Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Alicia Ostriker, Lucille Clifton, Mary Szybist, and Anne Babson. The introduction argues for a canon of contemporary American women’s spiritual literature with the goal of showing how this work treats aging and spirituality as major, connected themes. The author suggests that such literature narrates stories about how human and divine attachment models affect women’s perception of the aging process. This chapter demonstrates that contemporary American women’s spiritual literature interacts meaningfully with feminist theology, social science research on aging, and narrative identity theory. The introduction provides an interdisciplinary context for the relationship between aging and spirituality in order to confirm that US women’s writing provides unique illustrations of the interconnections between aging and spirituality signaled by other fields.