Advice from My 80 Year Old Self

By Susan O'Malley

What advice would your 80-year-old self give you? That is the question artist Susan O'Malley, who was herself to die far too young, asked more than a hundred ordinary people of every age, from every walk of life. She then transformed their responses into vibrant text-based images. From a prompt to do things that matter to your heart, to a reminder that it's okay to have sugar in your tea, these are calls to action and words to live by– heartfelt, sometimes humorous, and always fiercely compassionate. This stirring celebration of our collective humanity unveils the wisdom we hold inside ourselves right now.

"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