When adult children take up the labour of care for absent fathers and stoic mothers, when contemplating their own futures, things can get complicated.

Room 306. Level Three. In inner city Melbourne, David Carlin’s mother, Joan, is settling in. Five doors away, on the same floor of the same institution, Peta Murray’s father, Frank, is halfway through the statistically ordained 18 months he is likely to live after entering “care”. Each is 86. He-an ex-builder and sometime bon vivant-has shrunk inside his grey marle tracksuit but still fits proudly into his Sixth Form blazer. She- a widowed mother of three since the age of 31, turned activist, community leader and doer-of-many-things-is throwing on colourful scarves and preparing to re-invent herself again.

This book is a work of love and reckoning, as Frank and Joan’s adult children take up the labour of care for absent fathers and stoic mothers, while contemplating their own prospects for a “third age”. Murray, a playwright and teacher, is 60 and becoming an early career researcher in a late career body. Carlin, a writer, artist/scholar and, at 55, newly minted professor, is thinking about escape. Each is yet to fully imagine what comes next. Tender, funny and confronting, the book’s dual voices unfold along parallel and intersecting tracks, queer and straight, female and male. Part valedictory, part costume parade, it charts the complex dance steps of Father and Daughter, and Mother and Son, as they try on countermoves to the diminishments of elderhood and the pervasive forces of ageism, inside and out. Weaving memory, anecdote and reflection, How to Dress for Old Age asks what it takes to live a meaningful life all the way to the finish line.