For Keeps: Women Tell the Truth About Their Bodies, Growing Older, and Acceptance

by Victoria Zackheim (Editor)

Overview

Nearly every aging woman has a complicated relationship with her body. For Keeps, an inspirational collection of personal essays from writers on their ever-changing bodies, will resonate with every maturing woman. 

Editor Victoria Zackheim brings together women with unique voices who have all struggled, at one time or another, to make peace with the bodies that at times they don’t even recognize as their own. From a mastectomy that renewed one woman’s lease on life, to the emergence of gray hairs and wrinkles, each woman addresses aging, illness, injury, and life circumstances with humor and grace. 

These empowering essays explore the many ways that aging can be a positive, revealing transformation; Ultimately, For Keeps challenges every woman to rethink the way she sees her body through various life-altering changes in order to lead a more healthy, satisfying, and productive life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786750894
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	11/23/2007
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	460 KB

About the Author

Victoria Zackheim is a screenwriter, playwright, and the editor of six anthologies, including the highly acclaimed The Other Woman. She wrote the documentary Where Birds Never Sang: The Story of Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen Concentration Camps, which aired on PBS nationwide. Zackheim teaches creative nonfiction in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program and is a frequent speaker and writing instructor. She lives in Northern California.

Editorial Reviews

Nora Ephron's bestselling I Feel Bad About My Neckhas perhaps opened the door to discussing the failings of the female body and of female aging, and the 27 contributors to this collection deserve gratitude for enlarging the discussion. The essays detail a plethora of possible events associated with aging: aging mothers and mothers-in-law, one's own increasing frailty and final illnesses. There are deaths and divorces after long-lived marriages. Other contributors write of the abrupt arrival in the world of acute or chronic illness. Two very different threads run throughout the essays. One is the degree to which each writer has found a way to retain or regain a sense of power over her life. The other is the power of childhood messages and experiences to resonate for decades. Standouts include PWReviews director Louisa Ermelino's luminous account of her mother's and husband's final illnesses, and Liza Nelson's wonderful story of her double mastectomy-she's thrilled to be rid of the enormous appendages that had tormented her all her life. (Dec.)

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