Walking with Beth: Conversations with my hundred-year-old friend by Merilyn Simonds
Review by Melanie McGehee
Award-winning author Merilyn Simonds, writer of more than twenty books across genres, reached her seventieth birthday with a specific longing: she wanted a guide for the years ahead. In Walking with Beth: Conversations with My Hundred-Year-Old Friend, Simonds finds that guide not in a manual, but in a relationship with Elizabeth Pierce Robinson (Beth), a woman three decades older. Merilyn and Beth are acquaintances, both active in the literary and arts culture of Kingston, Ontario, when COVID-19 is in its early days, and Beth proposes this project of meeting regularly and documenting what transpires.
“It might be a book..” she suggests to Beth, “…but not a biography.”
Beth understands immediately, presupposing. “This book is for women.”
What unfolds is a series of vignettes (over seventy) gathered over three years. There are, of course, walks, as the title mentions, initially subject to pandemic precautions. But, later, there are also tea parties, shared art projects, and some months of letter exchanges, as Simonds spends long periods of time each year in San Miguel de Allende. The book moves at a walker’s pace, and I read it as it was presented. I lingered over passages. I returned to some. Many times, I set the book aside to research one of its many mentions, a novel or painting or certain philosopher.
Walking with Beth is a meditation on friendship—how it begins, how it deepens, and how it must be chosen. Both ladies recall that they were “irresistibly drawn” to one another over years of chance encounters, until finally that recognition became intention: I want that woman as my friend. What might happen if we did not leave such connections to chance? If we named what we were missing and sought it out?
The book expands our understanding of age. It challenges the easy collapsing of “old age” into a single category. The thirty years between seventy and one hundred are not incidental—they become vast, instructive, and alive with difference.
Beth offers a way of being grounded in both passion and restraint. “You can damage your health by giving too much,” she cautions. Elsewhere, Simonds reflects on Beth’s belief that imagination—not control or accumulation—is what allows a person to survive, even thrive, in the final decades of life. These insights are not merely presented as a list of dos and don’ts. Each arises organically as Merilyn and Beth share together.
The beauty of the book lies as much in its language as in its wisdom. Consider this passage, in which Simonds describes what draws her to Beth:
There is a stillness to Beth, a forever-ness that feels essential to me. It’s the same feeling I had around my mother, who tried her best to calm me, rein in my enthusiasms, my habit of wearing every thought and feeling on my sleeve—taming, a little, that rambunctious, rippling rapid of a girl. I’m still a bit like that, quick to enthusiasms that can suck the oxygen from a room. Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to Beth’s unruffled depths, the all but imperceptible flow of her emotions, occasionally glimpsed in the flutter of a hand or a momentary cloud across the eyes.
Beth’s stillness is not the stillness at the eye of a storm. More like the apparent stillness of a bee in a flower that you only notice when you stop your frantic weeding and get down on your hands and knees to peer deep into the folds of the petals, where the bee is quietly tumbling, humming softly as it goes about its singular, essential work. (64-65)
I feel myself in Simonds self-description. I remember being a “rippling rapid of a girl.” I yearn, too, for Beth’s stillness, which contains and focuses that girlhood essence with a wisdom that intently and softly hums like the bee. I see parallels in Simonds imagery and the work of her writing, that peers into the deep folds of life.
The book reminded me that relationships are the answers to much of life’s desires. It convinced me that there is worth to intentional, intergenerational relationships. It inspired me to strive for the kindness and gentleness, along with spontaneity and flexibility, that coexisted between these two.
“Inside this friendship,” Simonds writes, “we are not seventy-three or a hundred and three. We are ageless.” Walking with Beth left me wondering about my own life. Who are my guides? Who might I walk beside, if I were willing to ask?
Walking with Beth: Conversations with my hundred-year-old friend by Merilyn Simonds
Random House Canada, 2025, 272 pages, $25.99 [hardback],
9781039013346
Melanie McGehee lives in Columbia, SC. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University and she loves leading online writing workshops especially for women. Find her at www.melaniemcgehee.com