Author Penelope Lively Shares 'The View From Old Age

March 17, 2014

Guests: Penelope Lively - David Brenner

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Today is British writer Penelope Lively's 81st birthday. She describes her new book as not quite a memoir, but rather the view from old age, a subject she says she can report on with some authority. But her book also examines some of her earlier memories. Lively grew up in Egypt, where her father was working. She and her mother fled the country during World War II.

In 1945, at the age of 12, she was sent to live with her two grandmothers in England. Lively is known for her children's books, as well as her novels. She received the British literary award The Booker Prize in 1987 for her novel "Moon Tiger." In recognition of her contributions to British literature, in 2012, she was given the honor Dame of the British Empire.

Lively's new book is called "Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir." Let's start with a short reading.

PENELOPE LIVELY: (Reading) I've not paid too much attention to old age. To individuals, yes: family, friends. But the status has not been on my radar. Give up on my seat on the bus? Of course. Feign polite attention to some rambling anecdote, raise my voice, repeat myself with patience, avoid - occasionally, I fear - that hazard light worn by the old: slow, potentially boring, hard going. Now that I wear the light myself, I'm nicely aware of the status. This is a different place. And since I am there, along with plenty of my friends, the expedient thing seems to be to examine it and report.

GROSS: Penelope Lively, welcome to FRESH AIR. I'm glad you did report. I like your memoir. What is the status that you feel old age has given you?

LIVELY: I'm wondering now if status is the right word. I think it's more situational. It's that you've arrived at a different place. I don't feel that I have a particular status. I certainly don't much play the old age card, although I might from time to time. So it's more that you've arrived at this completely different stage of life that, frankly, you had never given very much thought to.

And, of course, all the other states, periods in life, all the other decades, you've been used to. But here you are, in this strange decade of the 80s that you'd never really very much thought about. So I think that's what the difference is, not so much status as condition, state.

GROSS: You write that, you know, in some sense you consider yourself a pioneer, part of a new demographic. What's new about old age?

LIVELY: Well, absolutely. We are the new demographic. I mean, it's the first time in human history there's a large tranche of the population - at least in the Western world- that is old, that is over 80. I mean, I forget the statistics now. I looked them all up for the book. But we're a significant group now, which has never been the case before.

There have always been old people around, but as isolated figures. People living to 80 would have been extremely exceptional 200, 300 years ago. So although the old were known, they weren't this army, as it were, this army requiring attention, requiring funding, giving grief to government agencies. And so I thought I'd like to look at this in the book, look at what it's like to be in a new demographic in this way.

And it is - I think it's quite exciting. It's quite interesting to be part of a new demographic.

GROSS: Which is part of the reason why you're reporting on it.

LIVELY: Exactly.

GROSS: So when my parents were older, and I'd visit them, their friends used to say things to me like: never get old. And I'd think, like, that's really not useful advice.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: I mean...

LIVELY: Exactly. The alternative is to stop short at some earlier point. So we don't have much choice in the matter, really. And I have a certain impatience with contemporaries who are not making much of a fist of it, frankly. I mean, I'm well aware that how your old age is depends totally on two things: It depends on health, it depends on income.

And if you have reasonable health and reasonable income, it's not too bad a place to be. Of course, if you're poverty-stricken, then it's an appalling place to be. Equally, if you're particularly struck down by one of the age-related diseases, then it's a bad place to be.

But when I look around my friends, one or two are, seems to me, complaining too much just simply because they have got old, as though this was something unique and different. We're all in the same boat, frankly, and I'm most warm to those friends who are making a good fist of it, even though all of them have - or most of them - have got something wrong.

GROSS: That must be a British expression, making a fist of it. I can't say I've heard that before.

(LAUGHTER)

LIVELY: Oh, you don't know it?

GROSS: No, no. Does that mean, like, being tough? Like...

LIVELY: It means - yes, more or less that, yes. Yes, being tough, really. Yeah.

GROSS: OK. So you mention in your memoir that we wear out before our time. Which parts of your body have been wearing out?

LIVELY: For me, I have spinal arthritis, but I - my back went long ago, when I was still, by my standards now, relatively young. I've had a very bad back problem for 20 years now. And that's sort of managed, but it restricts what I can do a great deal. My sight is not good. I've had cataract operations. I also have macular degeneration. But that may be contained.

My eye specialist says, cheerfully, if you insist on having this disease, you're actually having it at a good time, because there are these injections now which usually manage to contain it. It was, of course, in the past, the main cause of blindness in old age.

So those are the two sort of main factors. I've always had bad eyesight. I've been myopic since I was a child. And the cataract operations have helped. The back is the major problem. Otherwise, I'm not too bad.

GROSS: You cracked a vertebrae four years ago, needed surgery, and you were in intense, unrelenting pain for about three-and-a-half months. The pain went away, or at least that intense pain went away. If it hadn't, do you think you could have lived with it?

LIVELY: No, I couldn't, not that intensity. I can live with the pain I've got now, which is sort of managed by painkillers and physiotherapy, and I'm going to have a small surgical operation in a few weeks' time. But this was of another order. It was - I mean, it was a pain so severe, it could only be helped by pethidine, which is the drug you have in childbirth. It was far beyond the reach of the sort of ordinary painkillers that we take.

No, I couldn't have gone on like that, and I will admit to having had suicidal moments, yes. I felt, you know, that I'm not sure how long I can continue with this and was sustained by, you know, family and friends and a very remarkably physiotherapist, who was absolutely determined that we would get through this. He said we shall get through this, and we did.

GROSS: And is that still the person who's your physiotherapist?

LIVELY: Indeed, yes, yes. He's very much in my life now.

GROSS: You're very lucky. You write about being a widow. Your husband died at the age of 69 in the late 1990s. What did he die of?

LIVELY: He died of esophageal cancer, fairly quickly. It was about nine months from diagnosis, almost exactly what they told us when it was diagnosed. Initially, they said that he possibly might live for four years, but they sounded very unconvinced. And as time went on in the treatment, they said it will be nine months, and nine months it was.

GROSS: I would like you to read a paragraph from your memoir about being a widow.

LIVELY: Right. (Reading) The world is full of widows, several among my closer friends. We've each known that grim rite of passage, have engaged with grief and loss, and have not exactly emerged, but found a way of living after and beyond. It's an entirely changed life for anyone who's been in a long marriage, 41 years for me: alone in bed, alone most of the time, without that presence towards which you turned for advice, reassurance, with whom you shared the good news and the bad, every decision now taken alone, no one to defuse anxieties.

GROSS: That's Penelope Lively, reading from her new memoir "Dancing Fish and Ammonites," a memoir that she describes as reporting from old age. After your husband died, I mean, years after he died - because he died in the 1990s, right - did you ever consider either a new partner or just a roommate? Did you want company at home?

LIVELY: No. I didn't, actually.

(LAUGHTER)

LIVELY: I have family. I have two children. I have - at that point, I had four grandchildren. I now have six. Various friends, lots of friends. I was quite good at being alone, anyway. We - Jack, my husband, and I had both led busy, professional lives rather separately. He was an academic, and I was a writer. And so I was often on my own.

We lived in two places. We lived partly in London and partly in the country, in Oxfordshire, and quite often we'd be in different houses. So I was used to being in a house on my own. That didn't worry me too much. Of course, then I always knew that there would be an end to it. We'd be together again. So that's rather different.

But no, in fact, it was rather the opposite. I don't think I could possibly have adjusted to life with another person. I did think about that once or twice, would I like there to be someone else, and I didn't want that. No.

GROSS: You've said that you think women adapt to surviving a spouse better than men do. What leads you to say that?

LIVELY: Partly, I think, just observation. Looking round, my several women friends who are widows have all adapted very well. One has a new partner. A couple of other close friends who are widows don't. The only sort of friends/acquaintance, men I know who have been widowed, found new partners with almost disconcerting rapidity.

It seemed - it really did seem as though they couldn't stand to be alone, and you learned with surprise that within six months or so, that they'd set up with someone else. You know, you wondered slightly if this was just simply that they felt that they wouldn't possibly be able to adapt to life on their own.

GROSS: You write in your memoir: I don't think much about death. I'm not exactly afraid of it. I'm afraid of the run-up to death, because I've had to watch that. What are your concerns, and especially your worries about death, not having a spouse? Your husband had you. You don't have him.

LIVELY: Well, that is a worry, yes. I do think about that. I just try not to think about it, because what's the point? Whatever happens will happen. I'm - I have children, and I have lovely grownup granddaughters, and I hope they'll, you know, they'll lend a hand. But yes, I will be on my own in a way that he wasn't. And I know that, certainly for him, that was the great solace, that I was there all the time. I never left him for a moment all those last months.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Penelope Lively, and her new book is a memoir about being older. She's 81 now. The book is called "Dancing Fish and Ammonites." Let's take a short break, here. Then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Penelope Lively. Her new book is a memoir in which she reports from old age, at the age of 81. It's called "Dancing Fish and Ammonites." You write that you are no longer acquisitive. And is that in part because you've had to deal, after your husband died, with what to do with his possessions?

LIVELY: Oh, I don't think it's anything to do with that, no. Yes, there was a good deal of getting rid of things, because I was reducing from two houses to one, and so there was a lot to shed. No, I think the lack of acquisitiveness is, interestingly, it is a sort of old age thing. I have a house full of possessions. I don't want any more things.

But when you were younger, you often wanted new things. Yes, indeed. You know, you coveted a lovely new rug, or you coveted something new for the kitchen. I don't do that now, because, in a sense, I've - well, I was going to say I've got it all. No, you can always have something that's sort of even better than what you've already got, but I seem to have lost that feeling of, oh, you know, I really just must have that whatever-it-was. It goes, and - which is something of a relief, I have to say.

GROSS: You have a gazillion books, right?

LIVELY: Yes.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: So, here's my question: Like, why hold on to all those books? Speaking for myself, we have books and records on the floor and on tables and couches. I mean, it's just - it's way too much stuff. And you're not going to be able to reread all those books. So what's your answer for why it's worth holding onto them, knowing that you probably don't need to refer to most of them, you're not going to reread them, and you might not get to the ones you haven't already read?

LIVELY: Ah, well, that's an important question, and there's a very good answer to that. It's that simply that they chart my life. They chart my - well, I don't want to sound ponderous, but they chart my intellectual life. They chart everything that I've been interested in and thought about for the whole of my reading life. So, if they went, I would, in a sense, lose a sense of identity. They identify me.

And you're quite right: most of them I shall never read again. But you never know what you may want to go back to, and it does constantly happen to me that there's something that I suddenly think, oh, I've got that book. Let me just look that up. I do it every day. I look for something along the shelves. And if I got rid of them, then I wouldn't have them.

But yes, nowadays we can quickly acquire things on Amazon, or whatever. So that's not the main reason. The main reason for me is this sense of identity, this wonderful sort of familiarity of the way that hands wave from the shelves, as it were, saying: Remember me? You know, remember when you were interested in this? Remember when you enjoyed reading her? And that kind of thing.

So that's what they're there for, and that's why I think I've got about 3,000 books, and I don't want any of them to go. I did think of moving into an apartment a few years ago. I live in a vertical, 19th-century London house. And I could never find any apartment that would have room for about 3,000 books and a lot of pictures, as well.

And I just thought, no. We'll think of something else. We'll have a stair lift, when push comes to shove.

GROSS: Sometimes I go to one of my bookshelves, and I take out a book that I have from my childhood. And I'll look at it, and I'll just be transported back, like to my childhood. And I have all these, like, sense memories. Do you ever do that?

LIVELY: Oh, absolutely. Yes. I've kept - well, actually, most of the children's books that - well, that I've read with my children have gone to a family cottage that we have in the country. I've got, certainly, a sort of basic shelf of my own old childhood books, and I would go back to those from time to time. If I happened to be in that room, I would pull one down and remember, you know, the reading experiences of up to 12, which for me, were crucially important, because I didn't go to any school.

I had a curious kind of home education, which was based entirely on reading, and quite a lot of the books from then are still there. That's crucial. There's a wonderful retelling of Greek mythology called "Tales from Greece and Rome," Andrew Lang. It's sort of a late 19th-century retelling of Greek mythology, with all the stories of Troy.

And I reveled in that when I was a sort of nine, 10-year-old, and I still sometimes pick that up and look at it again, although I know all the stories inside-out.

GROSS: Your parents were British, but you grew up in Egypt. You were born in 1933. Your father worked for the National Bank of Egypt. Is that why your family went there?

LIVELY: Indeed, yes. He'd gone there when he was a young man - he was only 23 - really, because there was unemployment in Britain at that time, and unemployment went sort of up into the professional classes from which he came. There were no jobs. And so a lot of young men went abroad. A lot of them went to India, and went, effectively, where they could get work.

And I'm not - he got a job as the assistant to the governor of the National Bank of Egypt, who was an Englishman. These are the days when Egypt was effectively governed British. It was run and governed by the British. It was a protectorate. And it was before there was sort of full Egyptian independence. So there was a great deal - behind every Egyptian official was a Briton, sort of looking over his shoulder.

And my father worked for that bank for - well, right up until 1945, when he came back to England, and I did, as well.

GROSS: So, you grew up in Egypt as World War II was approaching, and then part of your youth was spent during World War II. When you were a child, there was a map in your home on the wall of the Libyan desert, and you said this was actually in the nursery. And it showed the movement of German and English troops at a time when Egyptians were afraid that the Germans might take over Egypt.

So was that a scary map to look at as a child?

LIVELY: Not in the least, no.

(LAUGHTER)

LIVELY: It's extraordinary how I think how impervious children can be. I mean, for me, war was just simply a condition. It was there was a war on, and there it was. And I couldn't remember there not being a war on, so this was a perfectly sort of normal situation. And I find it interesting. I used to look at this map, and we would move the pins around, and there was constant discussion of how the battles were going in the Libyan desert.

You have to remember that this is only about 100 miles away. This was not far at all. And as Rommel's armies advanced in the big push sort of closer to Egypt, which ended in the Battle of Alamein, which reversed the situation and drove them back, but before that, frankly, any right-thinking person must have thought that Egypt was very likely to fall, because the intention - the German, Rommel's intention - was to push on through Egypt and up through Palestine as it then was towards the oil fields of the Middle East, which was what it was all about, to get to the oil fields.

And it must have looked as though that was the most likely thing to happen. And indeed when it was sort of on the brink of happening, the general headquarters in Cairo, all the documents were burned. There was what was known as Ash Wednesday, when they burned all the documents in anticipation of the German arrival.

And before that, British women and children had been effectively evacuated and left. My father stayed, in fact. He stayed working for the bank, and if the Germans had arrived, he would've been interned and spent the rest of the war in an internment camp.

GROSS: Penelope Lively will be back in the second half of the show. Her new memoir is called "Dancing Fish and Ammonites." Today is her 81st birthday. We recorded this interview earlier this month. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to our interview with British writer Penelope Lively. Today is her 81st birthday. She describes her new book as the view from old age. It's called "Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir." The book also recounts some of her early memories. Her parents had moved from England to Egypt before she was born. During World War II, as German troops advanced toward Egypt, she and her mother fled the country for Palestine. But at the age of 12, Penelope Lively went to England to live with her two grandmothers.

In 1945, you were sent to England. You went on a troop ship with 7,000 demobilized soldiers and 100 expatriate women and children going home, you say except for me, who was leaving home. What was it like to arrive alone, during the war in England?

LIVELY: Oh, it was extraordinary. I mean, remember that I was coming from the Middle East. I'd really never known anything else. I had been to England once, just before the war, when I was six, and I remembered absolutely nothing about it. The first thing that struck me was the cold, the devastating cold. How could people live with this degree of cold? And remember, of course, that this is a time when no houses had central heating and it was - as you say - before the end of the war, so there was coal rationing. There virtually was no heating.

It was a very difficult time. They were still rationing, and I went to live with a grandmother in London. I was effectively divided up between two grandmothers. I had one grandmother in London, and one in the country, and I went from one to the other. And bless them, yes, they were both in their 70s and they took on this, I'm sure, extremely difficult, sort of traumatized teenager. I was 12 by then, and deeply unhappy and homesick and deracinated, and they somehow coped with this. And I remember it all very clearly, but through a sort of haze of, you know, mainly just being extremely unhappy.

And then I was then sent off to school. Well, it was about time. I had never been to any school. But my father sent me to a boarding school, which wasn't really the best thing to do with a child who'd never been to any sort of school before, and I was desperately unhappy there, yes, completely wretched there. I do remember a sort of very mature thought, actually, when I think I was probably by then about 13 or 14, thinking I'll never be as unhappy as this again, and it will end, which I think was quite a grown-up thought for a very unhappy teenager. And yes, for many, many years I wasn't as unhappy as that again, and, indeed, never unhappy in quite that way, no.

GROSS: So, London was still under attack when you arrived.

LIVELY: The bombs I think - no, the bombs I think had stopped by then. The blitz was over. It was a blitzed city. I mean, there was evidence of the blitz on all sides. I could still see the bomb sites on every street, and the sort of stripped sides of buildings where you could see where the staircases had been and where the fireplaces have been, and the bomb sites that were full of - brimming with willow herb, the plant, the flower that grew in all the bomb sites. There was rationing of everything. It was a very stark, sort of bleak time. Londoners were struggling - well, the whole country was struggling. I'm glad now, in a way, to have a foot in it, you know, to have known what it was like for people then, to know what it was like to have been around then, because only people of my generation remember.

GROSS: After the war, your parents divorced. And you write that your mother didn't ask for custody of you. And I was wondering why.

LIVELY: No, she didn't. She'd gone off with another man, and she had great plans - they had great plans. She sold the house in Egypt, which, in fact, had belonged to her, rather than jointly with my father. It had been a wedding present from her parents. She sold it, and they bought a yacht, on which they were going to sail back to England through the Mediterranean. And a child would've been superfluous there.

So, no, she hadn't asked for custody. It seems extraordinary to me now. Yes, I'm a mother myself, and I had two children, and I can't begin to imagine effectively sort of abandoning one of them. I mean, I think what one has to remember was that we hadn't been very close. She hadn't looked after me. She'd always had Lucy, who would been first my nanny, and then became my governess. So we hadn't had the sort of relationship as I had with my children, and I didn't feel to her in any way in the same way as I felt towards Lucy. I loved Lucy. Lucy was my mother substitute.

So, I wasn't that close to her. And I suppose, in a sense, you know, she wasn't that close to me. I think she expected that she could just sort of pick everything up later on. But, of course, by the time I saw her again - I didn't see her again for two years - by the time I saw her again, I was someone else. I had grown up by two years. And yes, I mean, you know, she was my mother, I then saw quite a bit of her. I used to stay with her and live with her quite a bit and saw her all - for the rest of my life. And I saw to it that she was all right in her old age, because she did live to be to a ripe old age, but I wasn't close to her in that sense.

GROSS: You write that you were from the pre-feminist generation, you know, before the feminist movement of the '60s, before the pill. There was a lot of - you said a lot of people were having sex, but there was a lot of insecurity about it. You'd always have to look at the calendar and worry.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: So - but - so when feminism did come along, the feminism of the '60s, did you embrace it or resist it?

LIVELY: I find that very hard to answer. I certainly welcomed it. By then, I was very busy being a young mother, and so I wasn't sort of in the job market at that point, and I didn't know what I was going to be or do. I'd only had one completely dead-end sort of job. I'd married very young and had children young. And so I had no career, as it were, and I didn't know what I was going to be or do a bit later on. So, when feminism sort of, yes, burst on the scene then, I was interested, but rather from the sidelines, I think.

I think it was rather envious. I remember thinking it must be much easier to be a girl now, because remember, by then, I was in my 20s, and I thought if only all of this had been around when I was a girl - particularly, frankly, the pill, yes. I mean, we - pre-pill days, we spent our entire lives worrying about whether we were going to get pregnant or not.

GROSS: You say that at that time, you weren't in the job market. Did you know you were going to be a writer?

LIVELY: No, I didn't, not by any means. Until I was thinking about what am I going to do, and I had a - I'd been to university. I'd read history at Oxford, so I had a degree in history. And the kind of obvious route would have been probably to teach. So, in the back of my mind, I was probably thinking I had better take the teacher training qualifications and start thinking about being a teacher once the children are both in school.

So I wasn't sort of doing anything about it until my youngest child went to school at five, and then I started thinking about writing. And, first of all, I started writing for children, and rather to my surprise, the books got published. And then it just led on from that. Then I was writing for both children and adults.

And then, eventually, sadly, the children - the writing for children left me many years ago, and I just wrote for adults. So, it was a very - I almost fell into writing, as it were. I think I'm very much one of those people for whom reading became writing. Not every intense, obsessive reader feels impelled to become a writer, but I think there are some who do. And certainly, for me, I think the reading somehow turned into writing. And I just felt, you know, that I wanted to have a go myself.

And this is before the days of creative writing courses, and creative writing this and that, up and down the land. And so my generation just sort of beavered away on their own, and then blasted a book off to a publisher, and wondered if anything would happen. And I was lucky, and something did.

GROSS: My guest is writer Penelope Lively. Her new book is a report from old age. It's called "Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir." More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to our interview with British writer Penelope Lively. Her new memoir is a report from old age.

So now, at the age of 81, being a writer, you don't have to retire. I mean, you've got a new book.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: You can write as much or as little as you want. Is that a terrific thing to have? Do you know what I mean? That, knowing that...

LIVELY: Well it...

GROSS: Yeah.

LIVELY: Well, it's - I sometimes wish almost that there wasn't a retirement point. It would be rather nice for somebody to have stepped forward and said, look, you actually needn't bother to work anymore at all. That's it, you know, you're done. But of course it's not like that, and, of course, I wouldn't really have wanted that.

GROSS: No one made you write this.

(LAUGHTER)

LIVELY: No. No one made me write this. I wanted to write it, and I wanted to have a change from writing fiction. But I just thought, you know, maybe there's something to be done with being 80, with having - you know, being in this position of being able to look back over one's own life context, your own 80 years of being slotted into history, as it were, and looking back at this, from this point of old age, and also looking at the whole function, the whole operation of memory.

Memory had always interested me hugely. It had been - the operation of memory had been very much a prompt for novels, and something that several novels of mine had centered around. So I thought, well, let's look at it in a different way. Let's look at it in a much more objective and practical sort of way. So I started taking notes and thinking: How would you do this book if you did it? And so, eventually, the book arrived.

GROSS: In your book, you write that you're interested in the way memory works, and what we do with it and what it does with us. Do you think that your memory collapses the bad things or - like, what stands out more in your mind, the good things or that things?

LIVELY: Well, both. I think for many of us, it's a mixture of both. I think we rather flee away from the bad things. I know I try to push the bad things into a black hole and not revisit them, but they're there, all right, and they will sometimes come swimming up out of the black hole. The better things, yes, you go back to them with pleasure, and you want them.

I mean, I'm in no position to answer why we have some things and why we have others. I mean, that's, in some sense, it's obviously the realm of psychiatry, which is not a place I can go to.

There is an interesting thing there, that I'm a diarist. I've kept a diary for, oh, goodness, about 30 years now. And it's really a working diary, and I sort of jot down what I've been doing, and also particularly, what I'd been thinking, in case this is going to help with something I might want to write later on, or in case I particularly have written when I've been traveling, in case at some point I'm going to set a story in Australia and I want some details about this.

But I find that whenever I go back to the diary to look for something specific and go to a specific time and place, what I read that I wrote down in the diary, I can't remember. I don't remember that. It's there in the diary, but I've got no memory of it, whereas, various other memories come swimming up, that have found their way into the diary. So, rather strangely, the diarist seems to have decided what was significant and put it down. But memory decides otherwise, and has preserved a whole different set of memories, and I'd love to know why that is - answers on a postcard, please.

GROSS: You write that you wouldn't want to be young again. Why not?

LIVELY: Oh, go through all that again?

(LAUGHTER)

LIVELY: I - being young has its stresses and strains, as well. It's a wonderful time. It's a marvelous time. But it's not just a bed of roses. It's not a rosy path at all. I mean, I watch my own grandchildren, and I can see all sorts of stresses and problems that they're having.

If, obviously, if I were going back and having it again, you know, you wouldn't know that you're having it again, so that's not that. But I don't particularly want to revisit it. I don't think of youth as the sort of happiest or most fulfilled time of my life.

I was asked by a magazine the other day to contribute a piece in which people had been asked to say what they thought the ideal age to be was. And I was interested: Quite a few people did say youth, but not very many, actually. And I opted for 55, the sort of tranquil shores of middle age, where all the stresses and strains of youth and aspirations are gone. You haven't yet got to the sort of rockier shores of old age.

If you've got children, you're no longer sort of breathing down their necks, worrying about their exam results and so forth, and lying in bed at night thinking how they haven't come in yet, or where are they. I think you enjoy yourself a lot in your mid-50s. I certainly did. It was a time that I liked very much. So, all you 40-somethings, take heart. The best is yet to come.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: Are you doing anything to - have you made, like, plans for your death when that happens, I hope many, many years down the line?

LIVELY: Oh, indeed. Yes. I'm trying to sort of organize the house a bit, because my poor children are going to have to clear up so much. So I'm not getting rid of books. They can face that. I'm trying to get rid of paper.

(LAUGHTER)

LIVELY: So I have tried to get rid of files. Quite a lot of files have been going over the years, because my literary archive has all gone to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, long ago, and so bits more go to that, anything that's of any interest to them. And the stuff that's not of interest to them, I'm just trying to get rid of as much as I possibly can.

And I'm also sort of sorting out - I've done something that's not quite like what my grandmother did. My London grandmother, I remember her tying luggage labels on furniture in the house that said - she had six children and the luggage labels said for dear Oliver on my death or for dear Margaret on my death.

(LAUGHTER)

LIVELY: So I'm not quite doing that but I have made a list that I think Rachel, who's my oldest granddaughter, might like to have the writing desk that was left to me by my grandmother. So it would be nice for this grandmother to leave it to her grandchild. And she might like to have the Gayer-Anderson cat which is the bronze replica - it's the replica of the bronze cat, Egyptian cat, that's in the British Museum and I know she loves it. So she might like to have that. And Izzy, who's granddaughter number two, might like to have - I can't remember what I've said exactly. So I have made a little list of, you know, so-and-so might like this and so-and-so might like that, which just might help my poor daughter when she has to sort everything out.

GROSS: So how many books did you say you have?

LIVELY: I think it's about 3,000.

GROSS: So when you reread a book is it like reading it for the first time? Like, I don't have a great memory, I never have, so when I reread something it's like, whoa, I don't remember that. Oh, I don't remember that. It gives you a lot of pleasure because you don't feel like you're doing it again.

LIVELY: Yeah. It's very often like that, yes. And I think what always happens is you notice something you hadn't noticed before.

GROSS: Yes.

LIVELY: I mean, a few of my - I've got a sort of handful of the novels that I most admire and when I go back to those - I mean, one would be William Golding's "The Inheritors," I always notice something I hadn't seen before; something else jumps out at me. And that would be true, again, Henry James' "What Maisie Knew" is, for me, sort of exemplar of what novel writing should be and each time I read that I see something that I hadn't spotted before.

And I think that happens with, you know, great books on the whole. There's always some level that you hadn't come across before. And other, you know, maybe less great books you may have read with less attention so that you suddenly notice something that you missed out on last time. So you come to things, in a way, sort of freshly, I think, yes.

GROSS: I look forward to reading more from you. Thank you so much for talking with us.

LIVELY: Thank you.

GROSS: Penelope Lively's new memoir is called "Dancing Fish and Ammonites." You can read an excerpt of the preface on our website freshair.npr.org. Coming up, we listen back to an excerpt of our 1990 interview with comedian David Brenner. He died Saturday at the age of 78. This is FRESH AIR.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. We're going to listen back to an excerpt of the interview I recorded with comedian David Brenner. He died Saturday at the age of 78. Brenner became a star in the 1970s with the help of "The Tonight Show." He made his first appearance with Johnny Carson in 1971 and returned to the show over 150 more times. Here's one of those appearances.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE TONIGHT SHOW")

DAVID BRENNER: I've got to watch my weight now, for the first time in my life, yes. I gave up smoking cigarettes. And you gain. You can't believe the appetite. Oh. And you try to be cool in a restaurant. You sit there, I'll have a little cup of soup and a side of salad and a side of beef.

(LAUGHTER)

BRENNER: But I'll never stop people from smoking because I haven't been - I hated when anyone told me not to smoke. Except once. One time - this is great, this is the best line I think anyone ever hit me with. I was in a drug store in New York and I bought cigarettes. I bought a pack of cigarettes and then I thought I'll look around. You know how drug stores - look around.

So I lit up a cigarette and I'm walking around, seeing what else I could buy, you know, what I need. And the druggist saw me and said - he says, hey, put out the cigarette. You're not allowed to smoke in here. I said hey, if you're not allowed to smoke in here why do you sell cigarettes? He said if you bought Ex-Lax would you poop on my floor?

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: David Brenner on "The Tonight Show" where he was a popular substitute host as well as guest. He had his own short-lived late night show in the mid-1980s. Brenner grew up in Philadelphia, where FRESH AIR is produced. We spoke in 1990.

Your father had been a comic. I think this might've been before you were born that he was a comic.

BRENNER: Yeah, it was way before I was born. Mm-hmm.

GROSS: And he was a Vaudeville comic.

BRENNER: Comedian and a song and dance man, yeah.

GROSS: So what kind of material did he do?

BRENNER: If you were to take - my father had a premise and his premise was I'd like to catch the guy. See, like, I'd like to catch the guy that says get married. I'd tell him blah, blah, blah, blah. I'd like to catch the guy who paints houses. I'd like to catch the guy who fixed my car. I'd like to catch the guy who made my car. And all that kind of stuff.

And I didn't take that handle but one day I realized that if you were to take my material and put it in front my humor, I'd like to catch the guy, it's applicable to about 90 percent of my humor. So in a sense, I'm not a clone, but I was a student of my father. I loved my father. He was the funniest guy in the world and a great friend of mine. And I emulated him without realizing, even though he said forget show business, it's bad. But being around someone so funny all the time, I just naturally picked up his ways.

GROSS: How did your father bill himself?

BRENNER: He billed himself as Lou Murphy. And then he had a partner named Buster, and they were known as Brenner and Buster, and their handle was listen to the two Bs buzz.

GROSS: He billed himself as Murphy?

BRENNER: Yeah, because there was a lot of prejudice against Jewish people.

GROSS: So he took an Irish name?

BRENNER: So, yeah. And he looked Irish. And in those days, all the Jewish actors and, you know, all the way through like Kirk Douglas and all, and everybody changed their name. All the Jewish people changed their name in order to be in the business. And my father did the same thing. Plus, my father's family was a prominent rabbinical family in Philadelphia. The Brenners were very prominent.

My grandfather, Nathan Brenner, was a top rabbi and Jay Gerson Brenner, my uncle, my father's brother, was a very prominent rabbi. And he didn't want the name of Brenner being used in show business, which is actually the reason why he left show business. He came back to Philadelphia. He had a contract to do movies in Hollywood and he came back to see his family before doing the movies and his father said, you know, you can't work on Shabbat. On Friday night, you just can't. It's against the tradition of our people. And my father ripped up that Hollywood contract and never went back on the stage again. And he did live his whole life regretting that he couldn't do what he really was meant to do, and that was be an entertainer.

GROSS: Hmm. So what did he do when he got out of entertainment?

BRENNER: He did a lot of odd jobs. He worked for the Philadelphia Record which was a newspaper here and he was in charge of the landscaping for Fairmount Park and he was the manager of the Fairmount Park trolleys when they had them here. He was an insurance man. And then the main thing he was, he was a bookie. He was a numbers writer.

(LAUGHTER)

BRENNER: That's the main - that was the mainstay of his income.

GROSS: Did he have to do that on the Sabbath?

BRENNER: Yeah. He didn't take bets on Shabbat. Friday night you couldn't make a bet with Lou Brenner but any other time, starting Saturday night - well, there were no numbers. I mean Friday was over. There were no numbers on the weekends, see, so he didn't take bets on Friday night.

(LAUGHTER)

BRENNER: He started taking bets again Sunday for the week. And he had a great talent. He could memorize all the bets without writing them down so he could never get arrested. He had one shortcoming, though. He was a compulsive gambler with it too. So when he would win, hit the numbers, he would play it back with some other book or his own book, he would make bets. And he was a real Damon Runyon character. He was a wonderful, wonderful character.

GROSS: So your father was a bookie. Now you play Atlantic City and Vegas all the time...

BRENNER: Yeah.

GROSS: ...where you have all these compulsive gamblers coming to be entertained after they've either won or lost a lot of dough. Are there things that you have to keep in mind when you're playing a room in Vegas or Atlantic City where you know a lot of the people have been gambling all day?

BRENNER: You have to keep it in mind because it's very difficult to make someone laugh who just lost a lot of money.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

BRENNER: The big gamblers, it's easy to make them laugh. I always feel sorry for the small guy who lost the rent and all that. Well, you shouldn't be gambling, we all know that. But my father would sometimes lose the rent. I know what it's like to not have money because your father gambled it away. Gambling, like anything, take it in moderation, I always say.

I have an addictive personality too, and so what I do is I play poker for very little money. I stay up all night and it gives me a chance to, one, get the gambling part of my personality exhibited and out, and the other, it gives me a chance to talk to regular people, because after the first few hands it's no longer playing poker with David Brenner. I'm now an adversary. I'm just another poker player and we can talk and I can be with everyday people, which I really enjoy better than being with celebrities.

GROSS: When you started doing comedy in, what, '68 or '69...

BRENNER: '69. That's the - June of '69.

GROSS: ...there weren't as many comics. It was before the comedy boom, before all the comedy clubs.

BRENNER: Yeah, right.

GROSS: And everybody had a niche. You know, like Robert Klein was the baby boom comic.

BRENNER: Yeah, in the '50s. Yeah. Steinberg was then. They came before me, yeah. Steinberg, Richie Pryor, Cosby, they were all...

GROSS: Richard Pryor was like...

BRENNER: They were way before mine.

GROSS: ...the young, hip black comic.

BRENNER: Yeah, right.

GROSS: So where did you see yourself fitting in?

BRENNER: I didn't at all. I was really different and I did what they call - now they tag it as observational comedy and that is to look at anything and find humor in it, that was mundane. A friend of mine, Richard Lewis, said you have monopolized the obvious. You have a monopoly on the obvious, he said.

And I thought that was a good way of describing my comedy. And I just got up there and did what I did on the street corner here at 60th and Osage Street. I just got up in front of Moe's Candy Store with my friends. I just got up and whatever happened, you know, a car would go by, I'd make fun of the car, person, boom.

Someone would say something, someone would say something dumb and, you know, OK, let's run. You know, come on, let's run. And I'd say well, you're still walking. I don't get it. You know, let's run and they don't run. You know how people always say that? Come on, let's run over there. And they walk. You know? And that all came from the street corner. That all came from west Philadelphia, and south Philadelphia before that. So I didn't think of any - I just thought I'd just do what I think is funny. And then they start - then they tagged it observational comedy.

GROSS: Does it still feel great to get laughs, having gotten them for so long?

BRENNER: My father, when I was a little boy, even though he discouraged me from show business, he said to me, he said, Kingy(ph), there's no greater feeling in the world than standing on a stage and hearing a thousand people laugh at you. He said if you make one person a day have a good belly laugh, then your life has been really worthwhile on this earth.

GROSS: David Brenner, recorded in 1990. He died Saturday. He was 78.

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