- ASIN: B0DW63YF38
- Publisher: On Becoming
- Publication date: February 8, 2025
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 131 pages
- ISBN-13: 979-8992126013
- Genre: feminist memoirs and personal essays
The BookViral Review:
In On Becoming, Miriam Rieck crafts a powerful and poignant collection of essays that illuminate the beauty, complexity, and transformative power of aging. With striking honesty and heartfelt vulnerability, Rieck invites readers to walk beside her through the deeply personal terrain of her sixties, a life stage she reframes not as a decline, but as an expansive act of becoming. This is not a self-help book in the traditional sense, but rather a meditative memoir that blends personal narrative with universal truths, offering wisdom forged through decades of living, loving, and learning.
Divided into five thematic parts—Embracing This Change, Living Authentically, Relationships with Ourselves and Others, Reinventing Purpose, and On Becoming Crone-Crone Advice—the book weaves through topics such as identity, personal boundaries, grief, sexuality, body image, and spiritual evolution. Rieck’s prose is lyrical and accessible, grounded in both introspection and real-world experience. Each chapter reads like a conversation with a trusted elder, rich with insight yet refreshingly devoid of preachiness.
What sets On Becoming apart is its bold reclamation of the “crone” archetype, a role often diminished in modern Western culture. Rieck resurrects it with reverence, positioning the crone as a wise, sensual, creative, and fiercely authentic figure. Her exploration of this identity is both deeply personal and culturally relevant, challenging pervasive ageist narratives that frame elderhood as irrelevant or invisible.
Rieck does not shy away from life’s shadows—there are raw accounts of loss, medical challenges, childhood trauma, and the evolving relationship with her own body. Yet, these stories are offered not as lament, but as alchemical turning points. Her reflections on “letting go”—of youth, the fluidity of relationships, perfectionism, and outdated definitions of success—are some of the book’s most powerful meditations, echoing a core theme: transformation is continuous, and aging can be a creative, liberatory act.
What makes this collection especially timely is its candid confrontation of the societal messages that undermine the value of older women. In an era dominated by curated images and commercialized wellness, Rieck offers a counter-narrative rooted in lived truth, community, and embodied wisdom. Her essays encourage not just reflection, but action: to speak one’s truth, protect one’s boundaries, and live unapologetically in one’s fullest self.
On Becoming will resonate deeply with women entering or navigating their later years, but its messages transcend age and gender. Rieck speaks to anyone seeking a more meaningful, authentic, and liberated life. With each essay, she lights a candle in the dark, inviting readers to claim their wholeness and radiate in the richness of becoming.
A moving, necessary, and beautifully written book, On Becoming is a love letter to the self we grow into, and a rallying cry for embracing life’s third act with courage, creativity, and grace.
It is unreservedly recommended.
