Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old

Lucy Schiller

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Book cover for Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old
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Book cover for Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old
Image for variant 9781250344526

Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old

Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old

Lucy Schiller

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Description

A deeply personal investigation into the current state of eldercare and what it means to grow old in America

Unlike many other cultures, our collective stance toward older people in the United States has long been one of casual avoidance and neglect. This attitude became brutally clear during the height of the COVID pandemic, when too many people saw elderly deaths not as tragedies but as foregone conclusions.

Like many of us, Lucy Schiller experienced this callousness firsthand when her grandmother passed away during the pandemic. In the wake of this trauma, propelled by equal parts grief and curiosity about her own fear of aging, Schiller embarked on an investigative journey to understand why the prospect of aging is so frightening and how being "old" in America intersects with class, race, disability, and public policy.

From profit-driven networks of care facilities to systemic failures in economic support, the future of older Americans looks increasingly uncertain. In Aging Out, Schiller reports this crisis, sharing the human toll of inadequate housing, health care, and community, while simultaneously excavating her own complicated relationship with aging.

Combining the incisive reporting of Evicted with the beautifully rendered introspection of The Empathy Exams, Aging Out is an intimate and unflinching exploration of what it means to age in this country and why Americans--including Schiller herself--are so terrified of getting old.

About the Author

Lucy Schiller is a writer and assistant professor of nonfiction at Texas Tech University, where she also directs the documentary lab Studio E. She earned her MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa in 2018, and she has previously served as the Provost's Visiting Writer in nonfiction at Iowa and the Olive B. O'Connor fellow in nonfiction at Colgate University. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, the Iowa Review, Literary Hub, the Columbia Journalism Review, and elsewhere.

Critical Reviews

Part of the New York Times' "Nonfiction Everyone Will Be Reading This Summer"
One of LA Times' "10 Books to Read in July"
An Amazon Editors' "Best Nonfiction of July" pick

"[Schiller's] first book is an exploration of aging's often harsh realities--care homes, Medicare, solitude, financial precarity, looming mortality--leavened by personal history and humor."--The New York Times

"A moving examination of the complex reality of growing old in the U.S." --The Millions

"Weaves the personal with the political in a meaningful way."--LA Times

"Aging Out is a luminous work of nonfiction reportage woven into a spiritual autobiography--a meditation on time, loss, and love as Schiller takes us on a journey through the industrial complex that surrounds the elderly while they grow old. Her story cuts into the heart of things, and has stayed with me long after I read it."--Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone and The Wild Trees

"Lucy Schiller pulls the sprawling, opaque subject of aging in America out of the shadows of private and privatized experience and into the fuller light of history, politics, and the structures that shape our lives, combining the fervor of a journalist doggedly digging for answers with the patience of an essayist gently circling questions; the result is spectacular. Aging Out is an incisive and lyrical examination of the dangers and possibilities of aging in America--not only for the old but for all of us."--Lynn Casteel Harper, author of On Vanishing

"With Aging Out, Lucy Schiller has written a deeply revealing investigation of the eldercare industry. Delivering intricate research with intelligence, clarity, and grace, this is a thoughtful, stubbornly human book about the small communal joys that arise amid systemic failing. It will reframe your understanding of what it means to grow old in this country."--Thomas Mira y Lopez, author of The Book of Resting Places

"A brilliant and sinuous work, Aging Out has the meditative pleasure of a long and roving walk. There is Aging, the industrial apparatus rife with scams and plans and paperwork, and within it, aging, the thing a person does, the thing we all are doing. This book dives deep into the first but remains anchored by the second as Schiller crisscrosses Pittsburgh on foot to find the story of the American elderly in intimate and unexpected corners. As John McPhee unpeeled the orange, so Lucy Schiller looses old age from the grip of bureaucracy."--Emily Mester, author of American Bulk

Publishing Information

Publisher: Flatiron Books
Pub date: 2026-07-14
Length: 272 pages

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