Though much is taken, much abides: the storied world of aging in a fictionalized retirement home

This study explores one elderly author's accounts of life within a fictionalized retirement home to understand how meanings of age are storied within a collective community and offered as alternative narratives to the dominant discourse of aging in our society. An examination of the five novels in content and form reveals how older individuals, acting as embodied and social beings, can reclaim meanings of age through the stories they share. Rather than perpetuate a one-dimensional view of later life, octogenarian Effie Leland Wilder deliberately stories her novels with multifaceted accounts that acknowledge the positive and negative experiences of growing older. Narrative medicine and narrative gerontology position imagination as essential for recognizing, understanding, and empathizing with the lived realities of disparate individuals. This study offers an important understanding of the ways in which storytellers and story-listeners can make sense of aging through fictive stories and literary ways of knowing. Implications for future research and practice are also discussed.