Sometimes before the start of a scheduled qualitative interview, participants give unsolicited personal objects, such as resumes or photos, to the interviewer. Although the interviewer may mention the object briefly in the interview or the subsequent field notes, the personal object itself is typically not discussed in depth or critically analyzed, partially because many interviewers are unclear what to make of them. Consequently, personal objects in the context of interviews have been undertheorized and underappreciated. In this paper, I explore how unsolicited personal objects function as a type of narrative positioning aimed at expressing aspects of self and identity that go beyond what is possible in the interview. Using examples from interviews conducted during studies on suffering and generativity in later life, I consider examples of personal objects in the interview process and suggest ways to incorporate them in interviews to achieve a more equitable power balance between interviewer and interview participant.

The acceleration of change since the early 19th century, the fact that everything ‘old’ (political systems, values, norms, customs, fashions) appears to be replaced by something ‘new’, is probably a contributory factor to a cult of youth and the marginalization of older people. This paper focuses on figures of oldness representative of ‘modernity’, i.e. referring to what contemporary authors understood as the ‘spirit of the age’ as well as to manifestations of a long-term cultural narrative whose driving forces continue to affect the present. Terms like ‘revolution’, ‘progress’, or ‘modernity’ point to profound transformations in society and everyday life, with special consequence for the sense of living in time and the status of older people. These terms have also inspired counter-narratives of alternative existences with other experiences of time on the outsides of standard life, where we often find old age. The examples, taken from Western literature, gravitate around France, Paris being in Benjamin’s view, “the capital of modernity”.