Web Reads: Remembering P.D. James

In memoriam. Crime novelist P.D. James died last week at age 94. In this Paris Review interview, James talks about writing, her affection for The Book of Common Prayer, and her dislike of political correctness. When she was 90, James gave an interview to the U.K. Telegraph and explained why she didn’t have cursing or explicit sex in her books.

In Britain, The Guardian marked her life and career. In a remembrance, her friend Nigel Williams wrote of James’s “unfailing courtesy,” which was “a proof of the fact that, with her, Christianity was not an affectation or an intellectual fad—it was a reason for behaving well. She had not had an easy life. Her much-loved husband suffered mental difficulties and died tragically young. Success—and the money that comes with it—did not arrive quickly. Perhaps that was another reason she was always so concerned to look after the weakest person in the room.”

The urge to wander. Many people with dementia get lost or wander. This story explores what’s going on in their minds and memories to make them head out.

Accepting aging. Writer and surgeon Atul Gawande’s excellent 2007 essay on aging combines descriptive writing with thoughtful analysis of how our society should care for the elderly: “We all like new medical gizmos and demand that policymakers make sure they are paid for. They feed our hope that the troubles of the body can be fixed for good. But geriatricians? Who clamors for geriatricians? What geriatricians do—bolster our resilience in old age, our capacity to weather what comes—is both difficult and unappealingly limited. It requires attention to the body and its alterations. It requires vigilance over nutrition, medications, and living situations. And it requires each of us to contemplate the course of our decline, in order to make the small changes that can reshape it. When the prevailing fantasy is that we can be ageless, the geriatrician’s uncomfortable demand is that we accept we are not.”