The Kitchen is Closed

The Kitchen is Closed is an engaging and openly honest collection of essays that reflect on the author’s life in relation to aging and what matters most in one’s life.

I found myself drawn into this collection when I first sat down with it, and I just loved Butler’s honesty, humor, and I was easily able to relate to her stories as I’m currently also a Jewish woman in her 40s (Butler is in her 80s) with a son that is about to leave the nest and my life is about to take a different course.

Overall, I really loved learning from Butler’s life, her candor was so wonderfully refreshing, and I had takeaways from each of the essays. This is one of those collections that you can read in one sitting or spread out over time, and I highly recommend it to all women who are looking for a fuller life.

Synopsis: In her eighties, Sandra Butler does not identify as elderly. Or mature. She’s neither plucky nor a burden, and she’s not over any hills. She’s old, and she’s ready to reclaim that word.

In this funny and intensely personal collection of essays, Butler chronicles her experience moving from aging to old, remembering and forgetting all the wrong things, feeling frustrated with technology, keeping up with the avalanche of cultural and political news, mothering two middle-aged daughters, surveying her old body, and ultimately, preparing for her death.

With its sharp humor and refreshing honesty, The Kitchen Is Closed is a must-read for aging women, eldercare workers, and adult children who want to gain a fuller sense of their mother’s life. Old women are cast aside in white American culture, Butler argues, and it’s both disheartening and disrespectful. Butler is not a senior—she’s a mother, a lesbian, a Jew, a feminist, and at times, a “rabble-rousing hectorer.” And now that her time is running out, Butler doesn’t mess around with things that don’t matter. She is supremely motivated, and she’s so much braver than ever before.