Return to Book Page Praise for When I Was Young and In My Prime Read the Globe and Mail review Read the joewiebe.com review When I Was Young and In My Prime By Alayna Munce AVAILABLE 0-88971-209-3 Nightwood Editions 5.5 x 8.5 · 256 pages Paperback · $18.95 September 2005 A moving, fictional account of a young woman’s journey through the lives of her grandparents, her own very different urban reality, and the search for something ageless. Terrible to say, but there’s a glamour in decay. All the sugars rising to the surface. Even the making of wine is a kind of controlled decomposition. The last days have an atmosphere in which everything stands out, back-lit, finite. Photographers call it magic hour. As if death, closer now, closer every day, radiates a kind of pre-storm light. And then that pre-storm light lasts for a spell after death—for the living. Basic things take on new definition, demand attention, but resist naming.