Opening with a vivid dialogue between two older female clients aged 68 and 90 and the owner of a hair salon, Rachel Heinrichsmeier focuses her research on older women's experiences in a small hair salon located in a village in southern England. The primary purpose of the book is to examine how ageing identities of a group of older women of different ages were constructed through their everyday practices and interactions with others in a small village hair salon. This inspiring book, full of living narratives of older women, invites readers to think critically about ageing against a background of increasing longevity.
This book is structured into nine chapters, with an introductory chapter providing the background, context and participants of the research, followed by Chapter 1 outlining the ageing identities from different angles. In Chapter 2, Heinrichsmeier introduced the site, methodology and analytic frameworks used for the research. Chapters 3 and 4 explored the ageing-relevant expressions used by participants. Chapters 5 and 6 examined how participants constructed their identities through talk and negotiations with salon workers on their own hair and appearance management. Chapters 7 and 8 focused on busy stories of participants in their daily life and examined the way participants achieved and constructed their particular ageing identities through busyness and activeness in late life. In the final chapter, Heinrichsmeier summarised the main findings of preceding chapters and considered broader implications.
Heinrichsmeier's impressive book offers a ground-breaking perspective to the importance of ‘triviality’ (e.g. hair salon visits) in ageing studies. She reiterated that hair and appearance are ‘the earliest and most visible indicator that people are getting older’ and everyday practices are ‘important parts of their lives and far from trivial for many women’ (p. 20). The hair salon as an everyday setting, ‘different from care homes or geriatric wards’ (p. 21), offers a trustworthy platform for storytelling, intimacy and friendship between older women. In the book, Heinrichsmeier involved into the research not only nine older women ranging in age from 55 to 90 as clients but also three salon workers of younger age, facilitating a verbal interaction between older and younger people. In doing so, this small hair salon, as an everyday setting, has an additional function of carrying topics of ageing and death for both the older and younger people under their different multitudes or stereotypes of ageing identities.
Another key strength of this book is that Heinrichsmeier turned her focus to busy and active daily stories of older women and criticised negative attitudes towards ageing as ‘perceived withdrawal, loneliness and emptiness’ (p. 156) through her fieldnotes and observations of busyness and activeness of several participants in their daily life. Heinrichsmeier revisited two current discourses of ageing (i.e. decline in ageing and successful ageing) and put forward her own novel and critical standpoint that to some extent busyness is the resistance of older people to the stereotypes of ageing, and ‘busyness as resistance … for a multitude of small, subtle, nuanced, understated moves – operated on the local, personal level … can accomplish social change, … gradually producing a new narrative of ageing’ (p. 218).
As to methodology, Heinrichsmeier pointed out advantages and disadvantages both throughout the book and in the conclusion chapter. From an interactional socio-linguistics research methodology perspective, she used three sources of data, such as audio-recordings of talk, fieldnotes of observations and audio-recorded interviews with participants. In contrast with the audio-recordings of talk and interviews that documented verbal practices of participants, ‘the extensive fieldnotes … enabled the general non-verbal practices and occasionally specifics of a particular exchange to be captured’ (p. 29). As the methodological limitation, Heinrichsmeier recognised that ‘the participants constituted a relatively homogenous group in terms of gender, social educational and ethnic background’ (p. 153) and ‘they were largely white, older and British women’ (pp. 222–223). If social class, migration, gender and other heterogeneous factors could have been included into the study when recruiting participants, it could have been more interesting to illustrate findings from intersectionality perspectives (Calasanti and King, Reference Calasanti, King, Twigg and Martin2015). In the chapters discussing ‘busyness’ among older women in their daily life, Heinrichsmeier seemed to focus on single identity – age – rather than the intersection of double identities of age and gender. In fact, compared to older men, older women have larger and more diverse social networks (e.g. friends) in late life, the former gradually becoming dependent on smaller and closer social networks (e.g. spouse or other family members) when they are getting older (Ajrouch et al., Reference Ajrouch, Blandon and Antonucci2005; Wu et al., Reference Wu, Hasselgren, Zettergren, Zetterberg, Blennow, Skoog and Halleröd2020). This might be the reason why the hair salon is a good everyday setting for older women to create their close relationships in late life.
This book could be a great reference for different audiences, such as students, researchers and practitioners alike. A short book review cannot fully show the richness this book offers on the topic. Overall, this valuable and timely book refreshes readers with new narratives of ageing beyond two traditional notions of ageing (i.e. either decline or activeness in ageing) and inspires readers to reflect their own attitudes towards ageing identities.
