Walking With Beth: Conversations with My 100-Year-Old Friend
by Merilyn Simonds (Random House, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Hay
“I approach each winter with dread, not for myself but for the people I love. I feel the creeping chill and know what it foretells: the dying time. The cold northern months take their toll on the aged and the aging, as if those already on the margins take advantage of the darkness to slip away.”
— Merilyn Simonds, Walking With Beth, p. 117.
Isolated by the pandemic and disconcerted by turning seventy, Merilyn Simonds reaches out to a woman thirty years older who becomes her “last guide into the future.” The Beth of Walking with Beth is a gentle sort of Virgil through the dark times of aging. The two women already know each other. They live in the same small city of Kingston, Ontario. They belong to its artistic community. Now they embark on a purposeful and deepening friendship, going for walks once a week and discussing everything under the sun “except perhaps money and sex.” Notebooks in hand they organize their thoughts, write down the questions they intend to ask each other, recapitulate what they’ve talked about, and, willy nilly, the idea of a book comes into being.
The magnet that is one-hundred-year-old Beth is a spry and beautiful widow, a grandmother who doesn’t dress like a grandmother, “her slim figure in red and black, entirely herself in a way so few people are.” She is the jolt of colour and vibrancy and wisdom that Simonds, deprived by the pandemic of winters in Mexico, misses and yearns for. Older women who live on their own have always drawn her, “their seeming certainty,” their resilience and honesty. Even as a child she sought them out.
I’ve not seen it articulated so well or so explicity before — the attraction many of us feel for older independent women. That Simonds taps into this general and deepseated fascination is a testament to her savvy and strength as a writer and thinker. We too, her readers, want to know how Beth does it; we want answers to the burning question of how to live the latter part of our lives.
Simonds finds in Beth a stillness, “a forever-ness that feels essential to me. It’s the same feeling I had around my mother.” In herself, on the other hand, the “rambunctious, rippling rapid” of the girl she used to be lives on in all manner of restless doing. These different energies give the book its tone and texture. Beth, for all her openness, shares something of her generation’s reserve, discipline, delicacy. She is a natural teacher and therapist, discreet and self-contained. Simonds, the author of twenty books, is more feverish in her enthusiasms and apt to burn herself out. Her life, she admits, has “often felt heavy with intent, with need and desire.” It’s lovely to be with them as they accommodate each other. Theirs is not a girlish friendship, there is not a whiff of gossip or spite or anything but respect. They are without rivalry. It’s more like a courtly dance between two female partners, impossible really to say who is leading whom.
photo: Leah Feldon
Light-footed Beth, blessed with extraordinary stamina, good health, mental acuity, refuses to call herself old: she is of a certain “vintage.” Open-hearted Simonds, blessed with an inner drive that brings whatever she takes on to completion, tends her friendship as she would a garden: neither too much nor too little, but paced, consistent, fruitful and creative. As they continue their regular contact, Beth turning 101, then 102, then 103 and counting, they both suffer debilitating illnesses that include shingles, heart trouble, an auto-immune disease. It’s something of a miracle that this book has made it to the light of day.
Take care of your teeth, counsels Beth. Correct your posture. Exercise every day. If you are Beth, you will avoid sugar, alcohol, coffee, meat. You will protect your solitude. You will woo your intuition and trust it. Key, she emphasizes, is keeping your imagination and learning-mind alive by applying yourself every day, if only for half an hour, to your artistic passions. Also crucial — certain rituals that offer consolation in the face of the grief that comes with losing a husband, a son, a daughter, for she has lost all three. And no less important — “the agility of mind” required to accept the loss of independence that has to come.
And so we proceed alongside these two women, the younger in need of the older as a guide, and the older falling in eagerly, generously, trustingly, rewardingly with their project, which is now this edifying and valiant book.
“I’ve moved more times than I have fingers and toes. More than two dozen moves in seventy-three years, not counting the decade of annual migrations to Mexico, where we’ve lived in six different houses.” — Merilyn Simonds, Walking With Beth, p. 227.
Merilyn Simonds divides her time between Canada and Mexico. Her 22 books include
the novel, The Holding, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and
the nonfiction novel, The Convict Lover. Her memoir/biography of
Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, an extraordinary recluse who changed the way
we see birds, Woman, Watching, won the Foreword Indies Editor’s
Choice Nonfiction Award for 2022.
photo: Mark Fried
Elizabeth Hay’s six novels include Late Nights on Air, His Whole Life, and most recently, Snow Road Station (Vintage Canada, 2023). Her memoir about her parents, All Things Consoled (McClelland & Stewart, 2019) won the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Born in Owen Sound, Ontario, she is a former radio broadcaster and journalist who lived abroad for eight years in Mexico City and New York City. Ottawa has been her home since 1992.
- Elizabeth Hay
- Elizabeth Hay’s books at Penguin Random House Canada
- Late Nights on Air won the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize
- Merilyn Simonds
- Merilyn Simonds, Reading Abroad
- Header photo: Cabeza de serpiente – Centro Histórico de la Ciudad de México; photo attribution: Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
