Shedding Years: Growing Older, Feeling Younger - Hardcover

With the publication of It Must Have Been Moonglow: Reflections on the First Years of Widowhood, Phyllis Greene became a first-time author at the age of eighty-two, and her book became a runaway success. The responses of her readers have “helped me shed years,” she writes, adding that she is younger now than she was two years ago.

In Shedding Years, Phyllis Greene explores the joys and challenges of the senior years with all the warmth, humor, poignancy, and hard-won insight that made It Must Have Been Moonglow a national favorite. Humbled and moved by the hundreds of letters and e-mails she has received from those who read her first book, confused by the advantages of the new communications technology, nostalgic over the snippets and mementos she keeps to prove that “the me that was is the me that is,” Phyllis Greene offers a refreshing and uplifting look at the rewards of day-to-day life for the fastest-growing segment of our population.

“I feel liberated to be at a point in my life when I know I am beyond changing what has been,” she writes, urging her readers to “persevere with joy.” In this wonderful book, Phyllis Greene shares the miracle of how we can all shed years by immersing ourselves in the glorious world around us.

'When I was eighty, I wrote a book called It Must Have Been Moonglow: Reflections on the First Years of Widowhood, and began to shed years. I shed them in the writing; I shed them in the many responses I received; I shed them as I went on book tours and met my readers of like mind and like age. I got younger sitting at my computer. I got younger walking to the mailbox. I got younger waiting in airports! After six months, I was feeling downright giddy―if not exactly girlish.

I still look the same―with the same wrinkles, with more white in my gray hair―and I’m still sometimes a little unsteady on my feet. But I don’t feel the same. I feel good, stimulated, and rewarded. Young."

Phyllis Greene is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wellesley College. She has had a life-long involvement in her community, having served as chairman of the board of Franklin University, the United Community Council, and the Columbus Metropolitan Airport and Aviation Commission. In 2001, she was the recipient of the Columbus Metropolitan Library’s Julian Sinclair Smith Celebration of Learning Award. She is the mother of three and the grandmother of eight. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.