The assortment of stories in A Lasting Conversation covers the broad spectrum of experience that is the ageing process, and the waywardness with which that process bestows its gifts and its calamities. The back-cover blurb gives an idea of the book’s projected readership: ‘This collection will be a resource for the baby boomers who are approaching old age, older people, their families, carers, doctors and medical students.’ The editors’ purpose in putting this book together seems mainly utilitarian and pragmatic.

Certainly, there is a lot here to spark recognition or realisation in the reader. An early Kate Grenville story called ‘The Test Is, If They Drown’ tells a tale of two characters, one young and one old, who are essentially alike yet find themselves in a violently inimical moment. The same thing happens in Sonya Hartnett’s breathtaking and heartbreaking ‘Any Dog’. Cate Kennedy and Tony Birch take as their common subject the fraught experience of scattering the ashes of the dead when you are already old yourself; Birch’s story also chimes with several others in its delicate treatment of romantic love in old age. And if the purpose of this book is to serve as a resource, then the several stories here that deal with dementia – especially the pieces by Hartnett and Helen Garner – offer insights that more and more of us, sadly, will find useful in the coming days and years.

Few of the contributors to Grandmothers: Essays by 21^st-century grandmothers show any interest in discussing the ageing process; their focus is on their relation to family members and the role they play in family life, and in the life of the world. Several of them discuss the archetypal grandma as the embodiment of old age, the little old white-haired lady in the rocking chair with her knitting and her cat (or being eaten by a wolf), and are at pains to point out that this image no longer applies.

Helen Elliott has chosen her contributors and commissioned these essays with great care, and the result is not only a satisfying representation of cultural and racial diversity but also an eclectic mix of personal and professional backgrounds. Among the twenty-two contributors, those best-known as professional writers – including Garner, Joan London, and Ali Cobby Eckermann – are surprisingly few, but artists from other forms also appear here: former ballerina and actress Carol Raye, painter Katherine Hattam, and weaver Cresside Collette, among others. Food experts Stephanie Alexander and Maggie Beer rub companionable shoulders with retired politicians Cheryl Kernot and Jenny Macklin.

This lively eclecticism has its downside. Style is sometimes sacrificed to content, and, as is often the case with non-fiction, there is significantly more focus here on the topic than on the writing. That is a perfectly legitimate approach, especially when the topic is so full of juice, but one unfortunate result of getting non-professionals in to mix it up with the best of them is that the juxtaposition can make the former look bad, if only in their intermittent struggle to rise above formula and cliché. Love for grandchildren is expressed in almost every essay, but even some of the professional writers seem to have forgotten that baldly naming an emotion is the least effective way of conveying or describing it, and some of these moments, no matter how sincere, come across as soppy and trite. Some of the non-professional writers have also given little thought to structure, simply plonking down one thought after another with no consideration for the gestalt of the piece, or piling up the simple declarative sentences without any variation in the rhythm of language or the reflectiveness of thought.

But every contributor has something real and vital to say, and some of them are standouts. Garner again demonstrates her stellar gift for exactly the right word in exactly the right place. A sparkly, punchy piece from Kernot and a polished, steely one from Gillian Triggs reveal a couple of people you’d very much like to have beside you in the trenches, if it ever came to that. And there is an impassioned, almost anguished piece from Anastasia Gonis on the lifelong tension between her ambition to be a writer and her Greek-Cypriot family’s ‘fundamentals of what is expected of a woman: family first, no negotiation’. I have pencilled annotations and underlinings all over this essay, and at the end I’ve written, ‘This one is an absolute killer.’

What stands out the most is the way that certain ideas and preoccupations emerge and recur in different contexts from one piece to the next: hopes and fears for the future, and the importance of handing on knowledge and experience, are common themes. Garner and Kernot both write about the advantages and the joys of intergenerational living. Gonis and Judith Brett both emphasise the importance of the family house as a place of safety and a repository for memory and dreams. Eckermann laments the fracturing of Aboriginal families:

In my experience, it is a different and often difficult role as a Stolen Generations grandmother … For me, there has been no easy path around the relinquishment of my son and the issue of adoption … As an Aboriginal grandmother, I feel I am constantly punished for a decision I was forced to make when I was a teenager …

This finds an indirect echo in Ramona Koval’s experience as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor: ‘Here was I at the bottom of the world, a child with no grandparents. At special school assemblies, when grandparents filled the rows, I sang for nobody.’

Given the way publishing schedules work, these essays will have been finalised and prepared for publication months before any of us had heard of Covid-19. Since then, some of the contributors will have spent weeks in isolation with their grandchildren, others under enforced separation from theirs. Some relationships will have changed forever. Recently written and future-focused as all these essays are, a brutal and unexpected line has been drawn under them. They already feel to the reader like voices from another time. g