Author talk with Jacinta Parsons

Warning: this is not a self-help book. Or, a helpful book, necessarily. No one really needs 'help' with ageing. It will happen no matter what we do. Neither is it a book to guide you through these stages of ageing. This book will not ask you to love your lines. Or to post on social media that you feel privileged to age. This book is, instead, a howl of rage.

Grappling with ageing is one of the most confronting elements of being a woman. When we become invisible, when we lose our sexual currency, when we lose that elasticity in our skin, when our bodies soften and change, when our perceived 'value' to society dramatically falls, when our notion of self-worth takes a radical shift.

What do we do when our outside self doesn't match our inside self? That old woman staring back at her reflection in the mirror doesn't understand why she feels so young. So how do we adjust our perceptions of getting older? What does it mean to age as a woman? How do we adjust our thinking about being in the world? What is our currency now?

Jacinta believes that midlife is a crucial reckoning with despair and hope, a time when you are naked in the centre of the world and no-one notices or perhaps cares to look. Midlife is a time when you take stock – to look back and understand how you were made as a woman, and to look forward into the future, to see how you might unmake yourself to live the life that perhaps you should be living.

A Question of Age is incendiary, raging and raw, but also compassionate, insightful and powerfully energising. It is a book for every woman looking in the mirror thinking she no longer recognises herself. It is a book for our times.

Jacinta Parsons is a broadcaster, writer, speaker and author of her memoir Unseen: The secret life of chronic illness. She currently hosts Afternoons on ABC Melbourne, delivering a popular mix of art, culture and ideas. She is fabulous talent for events and this would make for a great event – it is such a fascinating and rich talking point that all women will experience and have thoughts on.

Caro Meldrum-Hanna is an award-winning investigative journalist for the ABC. She is also the co-creator of the critically-acclaimed television documentary series EXPOSED. Caro has won five Walkley Awards for Journalism including the 2015 Gold Walkley and the Walkley Award for Investigative Journalism for exposing the illegal practice of live baiting in greyhound racing, bringing the sport to its knees. In 2016 she was awarded the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year for her ground-breaking Four Corners investigation AUSTRALIA’S SHAME, which exposed the abuse and mistreatment of children imprisoned in the Northern Territory, sparking a Royal Commission in record time and making international news. She was also awarded NSW Journalist of the Year by the Kennedy Awards Foundation in 2015 for her body of work on Four Corners, has won 12 Kennedy Awards and multiple Quills. She is also a five-time Logie Award nominee, winning the Logie Award for Most Outstanding Public Affairs Report in 2016. Her work has also been nominated at International Film Festivals and has been awarded internationally.