Reviewed by: Late-Life Love: A Memoir by Susan Gubar Arthur W. Frank (bio) Susan Gubar. Late-Life Love: A Memoir. New York: Norton, 2019. 352 pp. Hardcover, $25.95. If Late-Life Love were only a study of novels, poetry, and films in which persons of a certain age fall in love, then it would not be reviewed in this journal. The book's subtitle opens its second strand, which is a memoir of a period of time—maybe a year but it's vague—in which Susan Gubar and her partner who is called only Don (check the new Norton Critical Edition of Pride and Prejudice to learn his surname) experience multiple injuries and illnesses (more his than hers), move out of the home where they built lives together when they married in late middle age, and through all this, keep themselves in love with each other. As these two strands entwine—art and life informing each other—a third emerges: reading as healing. In her weaving of these three strands, I believe Gubar opens up a new imagination of writing in this field of literature and medicine. Some disclosure is required before proceeding. I have been in contact with Gubar since the publication of her 2012 Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, and I contributed a promotional comment to her 2016 book, Reading and Writing Cancer: How Words Heal. She and I are members of a very small club: those who have written memoirs of illness and then gone on to write more widely about illness and health care. With apologies for whomever I forget, she and I may currently be the only active members of this club, which affects how I read her. Before Gubar began writing about cancer, she was a distinguished literary critic, but tracing the continuity of her long career exceeds my scope. She is most widely read today in her Living With Cancer blog in the New York Times. A future entry in that series discusses my work. All is now disclosed. Late-Life Love is less a narrative than a chronicle. The memoir sections follow a narrative logic of earlier events leading to later ones. In the core narrative, Don suffers a fall, then is injured again, and Susan and Don realize they can no longer live in their beloved home, which they call the Inverness. The Inverness is described only in fragments, but it is very much a character in the story. The chronicle includes other things that happened and had to be responded to but, as Gubar writes, "They just happened to happen simultaneously" (305). Gubar's writing plays with the difficulty of distinguishing in life which events are part of some narrative order with preceding causes and outcomes that follow from them, and which just happened to happen then. An example is her repeated refrain of distress over the withdrawal from [End Page 226] her life of her oldest friend. The friend appears only in flashbacks from happier days and in quotations from cryptic notes she now sends to Susan, so we are left guessing what precipitated the break. Susan is left guessing. As we experience this uncertainty with Susan, we sort out the complexity of which events fit life narratives. Susan reads to sort out relationships like hers with Don, and how specific issues of late-life love reflect questions of the continuity and discontinuity of old age with the rest of a life. The preceding paragraph switches outrageously between referring to Gubar, the author, and Susan, a character in the story. When Gubar introduces Simone de Beauvoir's writing on love in later life, she describes Beauvoir as "a real person but also a character" (13). The whole book engages that duality. I can't tell which came first: Gubar or Susan. That's another lesson about life and narration. How the memoir depicts Susan living in what I would call fragile survivorship is its most distinctly medical contribution. There must be other follow-up memoirs of illness, sequels that trace ongoing effects of how illness continues to be part of life long after diagnosis and initial treatment, but I have seen only short...