" 'Since death alone is certain, and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?' So goes an ancient Tibetan meditation, intended to use our mortality as a clarifying force of guidance in how we live our lives. A modern-day take on this question was at the heart of a wonderful project by artist and curator Susan O'Malley, who asked a hundred ordinary people between the ages of seven and eighty-eight what advice their 80-year-old selves would give to their present-day selves." --Brain Pickings
"Advice from My 80-Year-Old Self is a brilliant and winsome inversion of that quintessentially twenty-first-century genre, the self-help book. Rather than looking inward, O'Malley reaches outward--to others, strangers, friends. She turns introspective reflection into a resolutely collective and communitarian experience. The accumulated words of advice become forms of visual communication, somewhere between interview and social campaign, conversation and agitprop: lay off the cigars; friends before screen time; i told you so; life is short make it good. The voices gathered here display incredible wit, sincerity, and generosity; we are lucky to be able to listen to them." --Michelle Kuo, Artforum
"From an 8-year-old boy's admonition to 'listen to your mom, be friendly to people, don't pull people's hair' to an 85-year-old woman's counsel to 'stay in touch with your friends, ' everyone, regardless of age, can take something away from this uplifting work." --RealSimple.com
