I just published Guy Got Old: Weird Stories from the Aging Frontier, a collection of 12 short stories about the inner life of old age: its invisible humiliations, its unexpected graces, and its surprisingly porous relationship with the past, the future, and reality itself.

The stories are contemporary in setting and sensibility, and shot through with the speculative: an app that lets you chat with your younger self and rewrite history; an anti-aging drug that destroys memory at scale; a pickleball rival who can outsource his pain to another player Dorian Gray-like.

The collection’s protagonists, who are always called Guy, are in their late sixties or early seventies, married, divorced, or widowed, and retired or close to it. They aren’t curmudgeons and not saints, so the stories do not moralize about aging. Each story arrives at its strangeness through the quiet logic of lived experience.

“Guy Got Old” is a Martian Chronicles, only the “new” planet is old age. I wrote it based on personal experience (of aging, not Mars).