Episode summary: Older adults often experience loneliness due to factors like retirement, limited mobility, and the deaths of their peers. Author Simon Van Booy’s novel “Sipsworth” portrays an older woman who is lonely and alone — until she forms a connection with a mouse and adopts it as a pet. Mayo Clinic geriatrician Dr. Erum Jadoon tells us about the serious health consequences of isolation — and we discuss the richness, beauty and joy that social connection can bring at any age.

This episode was made possible by the generous support of Ken Stevens.

We talked with:

• Simon Van Booy is the award-winning, bestselling author of more than a dozen books for adults and children, including The Illusion of Separateness and The Presence of Absence. Simon is the editor of three volumes of philosophy and has written for The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, and the BBC. His books have been translated into many languages and optioned for film. Raised in rural North Wales, he currently lives in New York where he is also a book editor and a volunteer E.M.T. crew chief.
• Erum Jadoon, M.D., is a geriatrician, internist and an assistant professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic in Arizona. Her interests include nutrition, bone health and geriatric medicine with an emphasis on functional status, unintentional weight loss and frailty. She is on faculty with the Academy of Communication in Healthcare and teaches communication to Mayo Clinic with faculty, physicians in training and medical students.

Purchase “Sipsworth.”

• From Bookshop.org.
• From Amazon.
• From Barnes & Noble.

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