This Way Up

A funny, closely observed, and briskly honest guide to the pleasures and perils of living life fully as a woman on the road to the far side of mid-life.

At the age of sixty-eight, with children well-launched and husband long-exed and recently retired from a demanding career, Cathrin Bradbury realized she needed a map—several in fact, some physical, some of the mind and heart—to guide her through the coming milestones and all of the inevitable "comes with age" stuff.

This book is her report from the road; a joyful, polished, often hilarious, sometimes heart-wrenching exploration of the questions and (some) answers that arise when you hit the three-quarter mark of a busy life. 

How do you stop shaming yourself about an aging body? (Hint: listen to the kids!) What are you willing to give up to pursue the creative passion you long ago put aside—and what might you gain in return? How do you become someone who allows the day to unfold after decades of list-making and agenda-managing?

And what might happen if one day, after nearly fifty years, you suddenly get a text from your first true love? 

Drawing on her own life and conversations with siblings, younger family members, friends, as well as authorities in social science, philosophy, and literature, Cathrin Bradbury carries us with her as she explores this territory that we all hope to reach, taking on new ideas and adventures with insight, soaring optimism, and a bracing dose of humor.“This Way Up is a treasure and a map, both at once. Cathrin Bradbury takes the reader on a trip to "three-quarter life," where love, art, and family become more meaningful than ever. A hilarious and unputdownable story of creativity, romance, and never-ending possibility.”
—Elizabeth Renzetti, bestselling author of What She Said

“The appeal of Bradbury’s memoir is in its restless questioning. We enter the unknown alongside someone who understands that the next phase of life is important but is unsure how to make it consequential. . . . [Her] writing is crisp, conversational, and occasionally wry. She uses her journalistic background to report on her life [but] perhaps the point is that personal books like this are what’s needed for women to more fully exist in the public eye.”
—Literary Review of Canada

"Bradbury details in graceful prose the uncanniness of considering one’s life in retrospect, capturing the wisdom and surprise of a liminal state where “past and present” are more like neighbors than distant relatives. Sensitive and self-aware, this is a captivating meditation on what makes a life."
—Publishers Weekly

"A charming, insightful book of essays on aging. I learned why our cell phone photos always look worse than the person we see in the mirror and that divorce however long ago still has a long tail! Yes,it does and so does this book because it lingers in the mind after reading it. I enjoyed the beautiful sentences too.”
—Susan Swan, author of Big Girls Don't Cry and The Dead Celebrities Club

"[Bradbury has a] flair for powerful imagery and droll humour. . . . The frustrations, joys and sorrows of aging are familiar, but Bradbury reminds us not to dwell on the long and winding road in the rearview mirror and to embrace the short runway ahead."
—Zoomer

"Eloquent, funny and philosophical."
—Hamilton Spectator

“With her characteristic wit, Bradbury offers a deeply felt and insightful map that takes us through love, loss, family, sickness, heartache, joy and e-bikes as we enter our third act.”
—Don Gillmor, award-winning author of Breaking and Entering

“Equal parts sharp-eyed and tender-hearted, Cathrin Bradbury has written a sly meditation on the wild ride of aging. This Way Up is both memoir and map—a navigation tool through the sticky stuff of life: friends, family, loss and love.”
—Katrina Onstad, award-winning author of Stay Where I Can See You

“The triumph of this book is that it articulates and celebrates the everydayness of life. . . . Treat yourself to This Way Up. It is a touching, engaging—and true—story of a life worth living.”
—Joseph Kertes, award-winning author of Last Impressions

“With razor sharp clarity, sober detachment, and self-deprecating humour, Bradbury takes us on her own journey of unmapping and reclamation. Beautifully written, intimate and wise, This Way Up is a literate and loving testament to being human.”
—Rod Carley, award-winning author of RUFF

“Cathrin Bradbury has pioneered a delicious new form of autobiography that somehow manages to be both hard-nosed journalism of the everyday and stream of consciousness tone poems to a life still unfolding. This Way Up hits a sweet spot on an unlikely new Venn diagram that includes Carl Jung, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Sheila Heiti, and Martin Amis.”
—Jason S. Logan, author of Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Inkmaking

“I loved this funny, wise and honest memoir! Cathrin Bradbury creates a deeply personal map of her life, cracking herself open in surprising ways—it made me rethink my own relationship to ageing.”
—Morwyn Brebner, award-winning creator of Rookie Blue and Saving Hope
CATHRIN BRADBURY worked as a leader and top editor of major Canadian news organizations and magazines for forty years, including as Senior News Director at CBC News, Senior Editor at Maclean's magazine, and Managing Editor at The Globe and Mail, where she won two National Newspaper Awards for Special Projects. She currently writes features and a column for the Toronto Star called "The 3/4 Life Crisis," and is a regular contributor to The Walrus magazine, where her feature article "The End of Retirement" was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2024. Her first book, a memoir entitled The Bright Side, was published in 2021. She lives in Toronto.one
MY MAP

I was going to need a map.
It was one of those 3 a.m. ideas, with the undistracted clarity only the smallest hours of the day can provide. I usu­ally grabbed my phone from the bedside table to act on these thoughts instantly, often to my sorrow. My brain lagged trying to understand why the pour-over kettle I’d ordered arrived thumb-sized, until I read the fine print: Perfect for your dollhouse. My first and only foray into vibrators—recommended by The New York Times’s Wirecutter, so what could go wrong?—was the Magic Wand, a name that sug­gested wizardly sprightliness, not the police truncheon that showed up at my doorstep. (Fine print: For women who like a lot of power.)
“Measure once, measure twice, measure three times,” said my brother Tim, a carpenter, after the fridge I’d ordered didn’t fit in the allotted space. It was my first new appliance post-divorce. “Don’t you know that’s the cardinal rule before you buy anything?”
“No, Tim, I don’t know that rule. Do you know the rule that you blow-dry your hair from back to front, with the brush held above your head?”
So I took care when I ordered my map. Obviously, I couldn’t buy a map to where I was headed. Even my deliriously clear 3 a.m. brain understood that any journey into the land of old is uncharted territory. Although the signposts were everywhere.
The way I could open a bottle of cranberry juice one day and the next day I could not—a skill unlikely to return. Discovering on a hiking trip with friends that at least half of them had to pee more often than I did and being triumphant. I mean, it made the whole trip. Walking into a table or chair—furniture that had always been there; no one was moving it around in the night—and finding myself apolo­gizing to a footstool. How my adult children had begun to speak to me in exclamation marks. “Mom! Be careful!” “Mom! What are you doing!” Being eulogized when you’re sitting right there. “Remember the time Cathrin . . .” The transporting joy in the smallest moments: a twenty-year-old running, legs high, in the cold winter morning; a lone bird calling at night, too early for spring. The liberation from the tyranny of things that “matter.” Not apathy, but that time’s too short or moving too fast—the onrush of time that you don’t have time for. Or perhaps that time, unexpectedly, has become too vast for petty things to get a handhold. I try to put myself in the way of time when it expands like that, when this newfound space of time makes it an ally instead of an enemy.
These changes are so gradual you almost miss them, until they become who you are now. A person with sudden inept­itudes, who triumphs in petty victories, worries much less than she used to, and is parented by her children. Yet she has found the supernatural ability, at last, to inhabit a moment—and bumps into furniture. The accumulation becomes the evidence that you’re in new territory.
If I couldn’t get a map to my future, I could at least find one that showed me where I’d come from. Lately, where I’m going and where I’ve been felt more and more like the same question. When you’re a kid, time’s so slow the recent past is ancient history—you can’t wait to move beyond it, to be nine when you’re seven. But at sixty-eight, my past and pres­ent had a newfound fluency. The older I got, the closer the places from my childhood became, until we walked around arm in arm like long-lost friends.
At 3:15 a.m., I paid Amazon $5.95 for a street map of the place where I was born and then lived for the first six years of my life. St. Catharines is a Southern Ontario city next door to Niagara Falls. When I was a child it was in its boom days, but now it was one of those slumped midsize cities with most of its industry long gone and much of its downtown boarded up. Writers often describe how the locations of their stories choose them, how the first thing they know about a book is where it will be set. For some reason, St. Catharines was choosing me. Other places have more resonance in my life: Grimsby, the town we moved to after St. Catharines and where I spent my formative years. Toronto, the city I’d made my home after university and had stayed ever since. The North, where I’ve traveled since I was a child and where my imagination lives. But it was the little thought of, barely remembered town I was born in nearly seven decades ago that had become a glint in my mind, demanding my attention.
The first problem with my new map when it arrived two days later was that the type was the size of salt. I needed a magnifying glass to see anything, and even then, it was impossible to read the street names. “Take a picture with your phone and expand it,” said my friend Ellen from up the street who excelled at life hacks. But the second problem was that I didn’t know what I was looking for because, as I said, I left St. Catharines very young. My mind held clues like runes: “Don’t play in the gully”—what gully?—and the excited feeling of crossing a high bridge across a deep expanse I couldn’t find on the map, and running running running with dozens of kids on the cul-de-sac where our post-wartime bungalow sat. Our street name, I hadn’t forgotten, was Argyle Crescent. I liked the sound of living on a crescent, swinging my legs on the curve of the moon. But I had no idea where to find it on my map.
My older brother Tim and his wife, Nancy, both grew up on our street in St. Catharines—Tim really did marry the girl next door—so I invited them over to my house, ostensi­bly for their son’s birthday celebration but really to look at my map. Before they arrived, I spread it over the table we’d soon be eating off. It took up the whole table.
“Come in, come in!” I said, swinging open the front door. “It’s windy out, isn’t it? Let me take your jackets. Watch the step.” We hugged and kissed in the entryway, but all I could think about was my map, waiting to be introduced like an unexpected guest. “Right this way,” I said, waving them into the dining room.
My map did not disappoint. It was the hit of the party. It took me places, too, the way only a map can.