At 60, bestselling author of Chocolat JOANNE HARRIS reveals why she doesn't fear ageing - and the advice she would give her younger self By Joanne Harris Published: 12:14 EDT, 7 July 2024 | Updated: 12:14 EDT, 7 July 2024 e-mail View comments When I was a child, someone told me: ‘Every life is a story.’ I used to wonder what mine would be like; what adventures I would have. My favourite stories were from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which my grandfather used to read to me: Thus I imagined my own story as a forest adventure in which I would run wild with my friends.
I never imagined growing old, just as I never imagined the adults around me ever being young. And death, if I thought of it at all, was a monster that kept to the shadows. I was four years old when I first encountered the monster.
It was in France , when my great-grandmother died, having been taken ill suddenly as she and I were playing a game. I still remember that suddenness, and my mother’s tears, and the various well-meaning relatives trying in their different ways, to explain to me why I shouldn’t be sad, how at 65, Mémée was old, how death was natural, and that she was watching us from above. At four, I concluded, both with certainty and a singular horror, that I had more or less 60 years of life before it happened to me.
For years after that, I would lie awake at night and think of the monster waiting for me in the dark, and tell myself that 60 years was a very long time. Author Joanne Ha.
