Wendy Mitchell’s memoir Somebody I Used to Know (2018) is not in the first instance a narrative about becoming old. Wendy Mitchell is only fifty-eight when her purposeful world of fulfilling professional work, keeping fit and single-parent family life begins to blur and lose definition. She goes to see her doctor to seek a diagnosis following a nasty, unexplained fall when running. Her doctor shrugs and unthinkingly accounts for it with one word: “age” (ch. 1). Mitchell’s narrative records a process of investigation that eventually produces a diagnosis of cognitive decline: specifically, young-onset Alzheimer’s (ch. 3). Prior to this, her doctor had unthinkingly read profound cognitive impairment as though it were simply a consequence of ‘age,’ or a taken-for-granted descent into longevity as inevitable physical decline. Indeed, even when she knows that her condition cannot be accounted for by age alone, the conventional stereotypes of old age are precisely the images that haunt Wendy Mitchell as she recalls picture-writing the dementia-to-come: “men and women at the end of their lives, old and white-haired … blank stares, the helplessness” (ch. 3, emphasis added).

Despite – or perhaps because of – this anticipated and perceived helplessness, however, Mitchell in fact writes a work of self-help. She tells a compelling story about sustaining rather than losing selfhood. Her narrative therefore participates in the wider tradition of self-help narrative that has a long literary and cultural history. What this essay will uncover is the way in which the self-help tradition itself has come to include ageing as one of its key concerns, and how, conversely, the writers of stories of ageing and decline often participate in this generic tradition, intending to help their readers as well as themselves.

The self-help narrative has been and continues to be an important contributor to the literature of ageing and gerontology (academic and popular) in ways that I shall seek to explore in this essay. The historical frame is important: we are, as Joan Bakewell observes, in the midst of experiencing “a changing place called old age” (the phrase from my title) because of changing attitudes to ageing; but also the appreciation of specific demographic challenges posed today.