When I Am Sixty-Four

by Debra Adelaide

In this shimmering mosaic of a novel, a writer reflects on the final days of her friend’s life. In the decades after they met at school, they shared a passion for books and words, took care of each other’s children, received acclaim as authors, and endured failure and disappointment. Yet during these last days together, as she and her friend go on walks through their neighbourhood, she discovers that their paths may have been more different than she realised – and bridging the gulf becomes more vital than ever.

Based on Debra Adelaide’s friendship with Gabrielle Carey, When I Am Sixty-Four is a work of extraordinary depth and grace. Tender and moving, yet infused throughout with unexpected humour, it captures the human condition in all its complexity: the small but momentous events that can transform a life; the way cherished memories can be rewritten or expunged; the limitations of love, but also its necessity; and the exhilarating, unpredictable world of the creative imagination.

Genres: Australia, Nonfiction, Memoir

208 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 2026

About the author

Debra Adelaide has worked as a researcher, editor, and book reviewer, and has a PhD from the University of Sydney. She is presently a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Technology, Sydney, where she lives with her husband and three children.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debra_Ad...

Reviews

[Rosemary Atwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘I knew she did not deliberately seek to copy him, but it was as if his fate had come prowling after hers, and at some point she stopped running, turned and faced it. I imagined this was her way of finding what she had always sought.’

When I read this, I am reminded of Jeff Buckley and the way in which a parent’s fate becomes eerily prescient - even complicit - in their offspring’s own demise.

Debra Adelaide’s elegant, compassionate tribute to Gabrielle Carey is a work of auto-fiction, a memoir of friendship, of the shared craft of writing and teaching and, in its final months, a desperate warding-off of the inevitable. Carey’s father committed suicide the day after his sixty-fourth birthday; Carey some four months after her own.

It certainly doesn’t feel like fiction in any form - and will hopefully find a new audience for both authors. A fine achievement.

[Jaclyn]

One of the most beautiful pieces of autofiction I have ever read. It will of course remind readers of Garner’s The Spare Room as it should but Adelaide’s account of her friendship with Gabrielle Carey and the depression that gripped her is something altogether its own. Just when I thought fiction couldn’t make me feel, this book saves me. Achingly tender and true at every turn.

[Alice Herley · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Shimmering mosaic” is a pretty accurate way to describe this book. It is a portrait of a troubled woman in her last few weeks on earth, narrated by her good friend. I think the most sad part was when you realise that sometimes love isn’t enough to save people. A captivating and beautiful read.

[Myrophora · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tribute to a friend who passed written as auto fiction. Provides an insight to mental health and how it impacts individuals and their loved ones. I really wanted a different outcome for the friend. The author honoured the friend by writing the novel. Thank you!

[Patsy Bourke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very difficult book to review. It is described by the author as autofiction - a genre that is not so familiar to me. If I had not read about or listened to author and other interviews before and after reading the stunningly beautiful prose full of wonderful Australian bird analogies, it may have been hard to work out what it was about.

It would be also important to have some insider knowledge of which I have some, having read Puberty Blues not long after it's 1979 release. This provides understanding of who are 'my friend' Gabrielle Carey and my friend's friend, Kathy Lette and their teenage escapades as surfie chicks in the 1970s. Being a not dissimilar vintage to these three high school friends and Australian, though not part of a beach scene, also enables some cultural connection.

However, not having read other work by Gabrielle Carey or prior writings from Debra Adelaide, there was need to gain information from different sources to better understand this vignette of friendship over about 50 years; with lives that had both commonality and apartness. The grief is incorporated is brief paragraphs which move from observation of something in one timeline to another - which can be the nature of that beast - moveable and unpredictable.

In an interview on the ABC's Book Show on When I Am Sixty-Four, Debra Adelaide, she says this style of writing was deliberate. If it had been more memoir, it would have required much fact checking of dates/times etc, but this method allowed for better reflection and use of some imagination.

It could be easily read in one session in terms of length, but in terms of content, it seemed better to reflect whilst savouring the very well considered inclusions.

[East-Daikon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This reminded me of The Spare Room but instead of cancer it's mental health. (Also disclaimer, this reads like memoir but it's autofiction.)

This book is about the author's friendship with Gabrielle Carey, focusing primarily on the time leading up to her early death. I'm going to re-read this on the weekend before leaving a proper review but my initial sense was that it was beautifully written and respectful without glossing over issues. This whole book feels alive, every passage needing to be there.

I'd recommend this for readers who have read in my father's house - reading that and her depression essay before starting this book will help it make a lot more sense, although it's not essential and you could go in blind.

[G Quinn · Rating 5 out of 5]

When he was 64 Gabrielle Carey‘s father, Alex, ended his life. He had been suffering from chronic depression, he had been made redundant as an academic and he was no longer in contact with many of his female friends including his ex-wife; he was, as his family subsequently discovered, desperately lonely. To understand his decision and assuage her terrible grief Gabrielle wrote a book about him, In My Father’s House.

When she was 64 Gabrielle ended her own life. She too had been made redundant as an academic, was suffering from chronic depression, and no longer in contact with any of her ex-partners. Her lifelong friend, Debra Adelaide, has produced this beautiful and moving book to understand Carey’s decision and to console herself.

Quite unlike Carey’s book, Adelaide‘s is a self confessed work of auto fiction. It’s a collage of episodes from their shared life together, reflections by Adelaide about their relationship, her own life, and brutally honest descriptions of Carey’s mental decline in later years.

Throughout these later years Adelaide regularly visits Carey, helping her re-organise her house, getting her out of bed in the morning, and holding her when she’s crying.
Carey seems to show limited appreciation given the level of practical and emotional support Adelaide provides. One of the harder truths the book gestures towards is the caregiving relationships are often asymmetrical by nature, especially in periods of decline or instability.

This is Adelaide’s finest book. Throughout it she exposes herself as devoted, resentful and morally uncertain about her friend’s condition. She provides no easy resolution about Carey’s decline or her own, often ambivalent, response to it. Her refusal to sentimentalise Carey allows room for love and compassion while still acknowledging the damage that radiated outward from her choices. Adelaide recognizes that intelligence and literary talent do not protect a person from repeating the very injuries that shaped them.

I read this book twice, in quick succession; the first time rapidly and superficially, the second time more thoughtfully and slowly.
On both occasions, I ended it in tears.

[Conrad Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Friendships build in welcome, aggregating moments. Death, on the other hand, imposes itself uninvited. Both loom large in Debra Adelaide’s work of autofiction, a blending of autobiography and fiction.

The book’s title, When I Am Sixty-Four>, is a twist and shoutout to the famed Beatles song. Often perceived as whimsical with its jaunty clarinet, the song laments the prospect of old age – “you’re sincerely wasting away”.

Adelaide’s book chronicles the deterioration of a childhood friend, Gabrielle Carey, best known for co-writing the novel Puberty Blues with Kathy Lette. Carey, with more than a dozen books to her name, was also an academic with Adelaide at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Throughout the book, Adelaide refers to Carey only as “my friend”, as if through sheer repetition of this incantation it might be possible to reconstitute a life shortened by struggles with mental health.

Slender and generously spaced, it meanders through fifty or more shared years. Small it may be, but the book rewards a slow, savouring read instead of feeding our tendency to scroll through a thousand Facebook posts in an hour.

The structure is piecemeal, but with a purpose. Ideas planted as an aside on one page return enlarged and in the manner they arrive in our lives, not as perfect wholes but in spurts as our brains burrow for detail to make sense of the unknowable.

The effect is as if the author has just had memory after non-linear memory return as grief slowly unfurls: I just recalled a moment we once shared but can never share again.

With anecdotes that traverse exhaustion, frustration, and confusion, Adelaide asks what else might have been done for someone who refused help. But the book also overflows with happy memories that sustained their friendship.

At one point, the two writers take a restorative stroll and stumble across a street library. Inside it, they each find one of their own books. They reclaim their orphaned literary children and give them good homes.

In When I Am Sixty-Four, Adelaide honours a friend by grieving a loss that is impossible to fully understand but is riveting to read.

[Dani Netherclift · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a tender, moving, and completely engrossing portrait of a friendship throughout life. I read it in a day. I read Gabrielle Carey's In My Father's House in my 20s, and it always stayed with me, so I understood all the references to Carey's father and her earlier life in Mexico, but you certainly don't need to have read that book to appreciate this one. I loved the beautiful, deft weaving throughout of the Indian mynah birds in Adelaide's Sydney backyard, with the winding story of her friendship with Carey, both in the more distant path and leading up to Carey's death in 2023. The book is a love letter to the writing life, and to an indelible friendship, and it is a gift to have read it.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not the expert on grief. I only know what mine feels like; I only know what I’ve recognised in other people in my life. For a wider perspective you need to be a regular visitor to Kate’s blog, Books are My Favourite and Best, where she brings professional expertise to reviews of ‘grief-lit’.

But I do think that when we are reviewing a book about grief, we should respond from the heart about how it made us feel, and leave the analysis to professionals in the field.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2026/04/17/w...

[Lynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was disappointed by this book. I was a friend of Gabrielle Carey in primary school until we went to different high schools. I had hoped this book would give me more insight into Gabrielle post age 12, but instead I felt it was more about what a good friend the author had been to her. Three stars because it is well written but minus two for self-admiration.

[Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ebook. A hard book to score given the subject matter. I cannot help but compare with Helen Garner’s The Spare Room which has so much more depth. What struck me about both books was the authors’ anger. Anger that their friend died no doubt but I think also because they were not able to influence how they went. Which is as it should be but hard to accept no doubt when so intimately involved.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb, enlightening, though provoking. Beautifully written. Thank you to the author.

[Carmen Watts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it in two sittings, loved every word.

[Liane Flynn · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book read in one sitting. Interesting style of writing that I found to offer superficial engagement with the narrator despite the themes of grief and suicide being heavy.

[Sue Gould · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 An exploration of grief following the death of a friend. Some beautiful writing. Dips in and out of present and past in a way that sometimes feels fragmented.

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book provides and auto-fiction account of the author’s relationship with Gabrielle Carey, but it is really just about the author. It was a little too self obsessed for my liking and it became very irritating to read. There was little about ‘the friend’ (Gabrielle) who I knew too, and they were portrayed pretty one dimensionally compared to the effort the author went to to show herself as so multilayered. It was disappointing. Gabrielle was much more than she was presented here and I feel her friend let her down in this account with no right of reply.