In “Alive, Alive Oh!”, Diana Athill Remembers a Remarkable Life

By Mary Kate Costigan
At 97 years old, Diana Athill has a lot of story to tell. Biographical details alone will tell you that those 97 years were significant; as an editor with Andre Deutsch for 50 years, she worked with such literary figures as John Updike, Margaret Atwood, and Jack Kerouac. Yet in her newest memoir, Alive, Alive Oh! And Other Things That Mattered, none of these professional accomplishments are mentioned. Instead, she has found that taking on the mantle of “Old Woman” (something that took well into her seventies) invites a new kind of remembering, something she had not experi...