Through thought-provoking interviews, research, and unflinching analysis
of her own life experience, Dr. Rubin offers us a much needed roadmap
for the uncharted territory that lies ahead. In a country where seventy-
eight million Baby Boomers are moving into their sixties and economists
worry that they’re “the monster at the door” who will break the Social
Security bank and trash the economy, where forty percent of sixty-five-
year-olds are in the “sandwich generation” taking care of their parents
while often still supporting their children, and where Americans eighty-five
and older represent the fastest growing segment of the population, we
cannot afford to pretend that our expanded old age is just a walk on the
sunny side of the street, that “sixty is the new forty,” “eighty the new sixty,”
.
and that we’ll all live happily ever after.

In this wide-ranging book, Dr. Rubin examines how the new longevity ricochets around our social and
emotional lives, affecting us all for good and ill from adolescence into senescence. How, she asks, do
sixty-somethings fill another twenty, thirty, or more years, post retirement, without a “useful” identity or
obvious purpose? What happens to sex as we move through the decades after sixty? What happens to
long-cherished friendships as life takes unexpected turns? What happens when at seventy, instead of
living the life of freedom we dreamed about, we find ourselves having to take care of Mom and Dad?
What happens to the inheritance boomers have come to expect when their parents routinely live into their
eighties and and beyond and the cost for their care soars?

In tackling the subject of aging over a broad swath of the population, cutting across race, class, gender,
and ability, Lillian Rubin gives us a powerful and long-overdue reminder that all of us will be touched by
the problems arising from our new longevity. The best hope is to understand the realities we face
thoroughly and to prepare—as individuals and as a society—for a long life from sixty on up.