Look Both Ways

Early in her career, the journalist Cathrin Bradbury was assigned an interview with Umberto Eco. “Assigned” is something of an understatement: her boss had gestured to the train tracks outside their office in downtown Toronto and threatened to tie her to them if she didn’t deliver. Although she failed to secure the profile, she did receive a consolatory telegram from the Italian writer in the form of a poem.

The original telegram from Eco has since been lost, but decades later, while sifting through some old Day-Timers from that chapter of her life, Bradbury discovered a note about the task. As memories tend to be, this one was generative. When her “Eco episode” came back, she began to feel “another memory just beneath it” until finally it surfaced: like her, he had a thing for lists. Her thoughts continued to unspool, leading her to an interview he gave after publishing The Infinity of Lists. “How, as a human being, does one face infinity?” he said to Der Spiegel. “How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists.”

In her second memoir, This Way Up, Bradbury explores the incomprehensible. At sixty-eight, she ponders what the next few decades have in store for her, especially since her financial adviser has predicted that — based on her education, location, and lifestyle — she could live to be ninety-four. That’s a lot of time to fill.

Bradbury was lured to a map of St. Catharines, Ontario, her hometown. She turned to it to help her find her way to the future: looking at where she had been to see where she was going. “The older I got,” she writes, “the closer the places from my childhood became.” Despite having carried the idea of a big, adventurous life since she was a teenager, the truth was, judging by the lines spread out before her, that she had moved a mere two inches across Lake Ontario.

The appeal of Bradbury’s memoir is in its restless questioning. We enter the unknown alongside someone who understands that the next phase of life is important but is unsure how to make it consequential. She began doing research into aging, having probing conversations with friends and experts, then closely examining what she really wanted. For a while, she assumed she would focus on travel. But rather than booking a ticket to Greece, she commissioned her nephew to build a writing hut in her backyard.

As part of her reflective approach, Bradbury returned to the familiar comfort of lists, starting with what she has: health, family, a house, a bike, “a new and unexpected vocation as a writer,” and, perhaps paradoxically, optimism. She also has two friends “for life.” Ellen provides intellectual and philosophical conversations on long walks. Bradbury compares their relationship to “Grand Central Station, the way our talking tracks merge and separate.” Meryl, whom she has known since childhood, is all heart. Although they live far apart, their friendship has “emotional fluency.” Bradbury also took stock of what she doesn’t have: a car, a job, a god, a second language, and the ease that allowed her younger self to move through the world with confidence and grace.

Through her scientific reading, she discovered that the cliché about wisdom accumulating with age is true, that there is an elasticity of thought and feeling that starts around sixty and continues until we are eighty. In our younger minds, “each hemisphere of the brain might be responsible for a particular type of information, and the two don’t meet up.” As we age, our brain recruits from each side at the same time, efficiently choosing a more direct route and therefore clearing unnecessary details in the process. In turn, we are “better able to synthesize disparate views, less susceptible to absolute truths and black-and-white thinking.” In other words, we get wiser.

However intentional this period of investigation and planning was for her, the peculiarities of life still crept in. An old boyfriend resurfaced, and her grandson was born. Both were unexpected, disruptive forces that required much reckoning on Bradbury’s part.

The lover, referred to as D, appeared suddenly and with as little fanfare as when he left her at seventeen. With a brief email, he began a correspondence that encroached on her emotional self, leaving her vulnerable and excited in equal measure. Their rekindled romance floundered until they found the boundaries that suited them both, including his need for specific discussion topics, to avoid the “ ‘jazz improv’ of random conversation,” and their agreement to return to their own beds at the end of days spent together. That he landed on her proverbial doorstep at a time when her life was in flux and full of introspection meant that their dynamic was ripe for full examination. During one of their breaks, she realized that though she missed him, she also, perhaps more significantly, had “missed the hopeful feeling he’d given me of changing my life, even when I hadn’t expected or wanted to.”

With the arrival of her grandson, Bradbury joined the flood of overzealous grandparents these times have propagated. She notes that in previous times, grandparents were usually spread thin between several children; but now, with dwindling family sizes, they not only dote on but establish deep relationships with other generations. For Bradbury, this connection has been hard‑won, as relations became strained when she agreed to house her son, daughter-in-law, and, eventually, their child. Living together during a pandemic unearthed the intense stress that once affected her as a mother while in a marriage that ended long past its due date. “We were each going through enough upheaval to sink the most buoyant domestic ship,” she admits.

Bradbury’s writing is crisp, conversational, and occasionally wry. She uses her journalistic background to report on her life, following leads as they come in. At times, this technique feels random, and there are some threads that might have been expanded on, especially the issue she raises early on about the invisibility of women as they enter this stage of life. But perhaps the point is that personal books like this are what’s needed for women to more fully exist in the public eye.

Bradbury once thought of death as a lifelong enemy. In This Way Up, she comes to see it as an “ally of sorts rather than something to be denied and avoided.” There are, in fact, many ways to thrive in the years ahead, she realizes, and in quoting Muriel Spark —“Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur”— Bradbury may just have come up with her own thesis.