Elizabeth showed up to this one running on fumes (maybe it was the equinox?), so she led with book recs instead of righteous fury: The Correspondent, a Cannon Beach impulse buy called Sipsworth that apparently defrosted something in her chest, and Ann Patchett’s Whistler, devoured in a single 24-hour fugue state.
Then she got to the actual reason you’re here. A woman on Threads posted her list of everything she no longer gives a fuck about now that she’s in her 60s — DNF-ing bad books was a highlight — and Elizabeth loved it, stole it, made her own version, and then had the audacity to actually think about it for five seconds.
Which ruined everything.
Because every one of these lists, hers included, is secretly the same tired plotline as “passing the torch”: you get old, you get tired, you gracefully fade into a beige cardigan and stop taking up space. Congratulations on your subtraction era.
So she goes to war with the words “invisible” and “irrelevant,” asking the extremely reasonable question of invisible to whom, exactly, because her kids see her fine, her clients pay her actual money to see her, and the neighborhood dogs are big fans. Turns out the whole invisibility thing was never a law of nature — it was marketing, aimed at an audience that was never worth auditioning for in the first place. There’s also a detour into the grandmother hypothesis, which is a real anthropological theory about women in Tanzania whose foraging may have single-handedly kept humanity alive, deployed here as evidence that older women aren’t fading extras, they’re the load-bearing wall of the whole operation.
She wraps by flipping the script entirely: instead of another list of what she’s given up, she runs through everything she’s making more room for now that she’s stopped performing for an audience that was never real — opinions, pleasure, ambition, curiosity, her own intuition — and asks you to send yours.
