Not Dead Yet: A Feisty Bohemian Explores the Art of Growing Old

Herbert Gold

Aug 2011 · Skyhorse

About this ebook

An upbeat memoir to savor and admire, Still Alive! proves that in your later years you can still be going strong . . . and having fun! “Old age is a shipwreck,” Charles de Gaulle once observed. Not so, says Herb Gold in this lively, often hilarious memoir of his first seven decades. He is clearly enjoying every moment to its fullest. This is a book about how time overtakes us, how reminiscence, loss, hope, pain, success, failure—the lifelong accumulation of dreams and reality—crowd about us with every passing day.

Combining a fascinating selection of people, places, and key events from a long life into the alembic of his ever-fertile imagination, Gold has distilled gold from his uncanny ability to recall conversations, anecdotes, atmosphere, and telling detail. By turns wickedly funny (“Prostate surgeries and hysterectomies are not immediately visible at art gallery openings.”) and touching (“It’s harder to learn how to laugh alone.”), Still Alive!, in this age of overheated memoirs, will surely find its way to a grateful audience both young and young at heart.

About the author

Herbert Gold was born and raised in Cleveland, but rose to national fame with his roman à clef Fathers. A longtime chronicler of the Beat movement, he lives in San Francisco. Gold is an established writer who has written many successful works of fiction and nonfiction, including the bestsellers Fathers (Random House, 1966), A Girl of Forty (Dell, 1989), Bohemia (Touchstone, 1994), and Best Nightmare on Earth (Touchstone, 1992).