“The Second Half” of life by photographer Ellen Warner

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Odette Walling, © Ellen Warner from The Second Half, Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty, published by Brandeis University Press.

Ellen Warner is a photographer who one day started asking questions to her models: do you prefer your life before fifty or after? and she was surprised to find out that most women preferred the second half with more experience and more “letting go”. “In the second half you know who you are, and you are liberated by not caring what others think o you”. The women she interviewed are American, British, Italian, French, Birmese or Saudi.  They are rich and successful or from poorer backgrounds, all beautiful in their own way. As Erica Young says in her foreword to the book, “these women know of pain from labor, be it childbirth or long hours at work”…” We need to celebrate women not for wrinkles, but for laugh lines”….”Experience is as beautiful as youth”.

Charlotte Mosley, © Ellen Warner from The Second Half, Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty, published by Brandeis University Press.

The idea for the book came in 2003 in Patmos, the Greek island she fell in love with and returns to every year. Some of the women interviewed have died since, because it took fifteen years to complete the book “The Second Half,  forty women reveal life after fifty”, which was just published by Brandeis University Press.  The order in which they appear in the book is random and Odette Walling, a holocaust survivor and resistance leader in France is the first. And sets the tone. She realized her father was dead when she was four, and she was taken to the cemetery and ordered to throw a flower in the tomb. She resisted the Germans’ interrogation methods (torture) and says” “they put me underwater to emcee me talk. I’ve never again put my head under water”. And of the camps she says: “You carried , without food, a fifty kilo ba with the dogs after you. I loved dogs. They could sense it. I was never attacked by one”.

Dr Fathia Al Sulimani,© Ellen Warner from The Second Half, Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty, published by Brandeis University Press.

Jean Angell is another dramatic story of a very successful Wall Street lawyer who studied at “Harvard when there were only 28  women among 550 men in the Law school”, and led the perfect life of a mother, a successful professional who could afford to work for non profit boards and was suddenly hit at 53, by Lou Gehrig’s disease which slowly paralyzed her. Which she had the strength and will to fight. “Knowing you are living on borrowed time is strange” she says.

Jean Angell, © Ellen Warner from The Second Half, Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty, published by Brandeis University Press.

A flamboyant Australian pub manager in London, Roxy Beaujolais (the name sounds like a Crazy Horse dancer), tells how she Feld Adelaide at 25 and came to Europe in a cargo boat for free and loves managing her pub. Teresa Sayward is a farmer from upstate New York who became town supervisor and state assemblywoman. Leslie Caron was trained as a dancer by her mother and started a stage career with Roland Petit at 16 and was cast by Gene Kelly in “An American in Paris”. She then married the director Peter Hall. “My greatest happiness were teh years when my children were born when I was twenty five to forty… My fifties were the most difficult years for me… I learned to be disciplined in the first half, and that helped me in the second.”

Photographer Ellen Warner

Two Saudi women, Dr Fathia Al Sulimani  and Salama Ba Sunbol an embroidery specialist from Riyadh tell their story fo working in a country where women have to fight diplomatically. Ma Thanegi is an artist who worked as personal assistant to Angeles San Suu Kyi in Rangoon. she served time in prison and came out at 46 in 1993. She says that what she learned then helped her beck me na artist. Sh lived alone and is one of the rare women in the book not to have a family. Yeshe Drolma is a buddhist lama who used to work in the fashion world …

Perla Servan Schreiber, a successful French publisher, © Ellen Warner from The Second Half, Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty, published by Brandeis University Press.

There are a few former cooks and housekeepers Elo Papassin, from Manila, Irene Carlos and Modestine Brown from Antigua, a Tuareg nomad from Tamanrasset, a farmer from Patmos, a healer from Ubud in Bali. A common advice from all of them is to cherish ones family and children.

There are of course a few designers from Italy, publishers from France and writers such as Charlotte eMosley and Poet Laureate Marilynn Nelson.  The book ends with Olivia de Haviland who was born in Tokyo in 1916 and recently died in Paris at 104. Her wish was to live to one hundred and said” I think that women should welcome their birthdays. Every birthday is a victory… I do drink champagne. At six o’clock every night, I have tow glass. I used to have three – in my eighties it was three.”

Leslie Caron, © Ellen Warner from The Second Half, Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty, published by Brandeis University Press.

A you can see, there are many good advices in this book and it si heart warming to read about all these destinies of famous and unknown women. I have never met Ellen Warner but now I really look forward to seeing her one day.

“The Second Half, Forty women reveal life after fifty”  by Ellen Warner, is published on March 8 by Brandeis University Press, 35$, 242 pages

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