103 Speaks: The Legacy of Babette Hughes
She lived 103 years… and never stopped speaking the truth. In this tribute, Nicole reflects on a friendship that shaped her life, and the extraordinary woman behind 103 Speaks. This is a legacy of resilience, wisdom, and a voice that refuses to fade.
NICOLE JEFFORDS NONFICTION
On March 12, 2026 my fellow writer, Babette Hughes, passed away. She had just completed her final book, 103 Speaks: Reflections on Longevity, filled with all the wisdom she had gained about living and dying at an advanced age (or at any age after, say, fifty). She was, indeed, one-hundred-and-three. By then, she had lost her sight to macular degeneration and had to dictate her words to an editorial assistant, a skill that had to be learned as it was so different from writing on a computer and being able to see the page.
I had met her in 1991, the year my family moved from Brooklyn, New York to Austin, Texas. (In fact, I met her at a writer's group the second week we arrived in Austin.) She was a spectacular-looking woman, tall and slender with short dark hair that had a copper streak running across the crown of her head. The meeting was held in the large, carpeted living room of one of the group members, everyone sitting in a circle on the floor. I sat down next to Babette and we immediately started talking. I guess we must have recognized something familiar in one another because from that time on we never stopped talking. She became my close friend and mentor, mother, sister and teacher all wrapped into one. I don’t think I ever made a decision regarding tricky family relationships (or relationships with people in general) without first consulting Babette. She was the wisest person I knew.
Luckily, she lived close to me and I would regularly go to her house and sit in her cozy den, a room filled with books, paintings and photos, and have a ginger ale or cup of coffee. And talk, talk, talk, conferring on everything from politics to raising children. Mostly we talked about writing and how wonderful it made our brains feel to juggle with words and put together stories. She had been a journalist when she lived in Washington D.C. and knew a lot more than I did.
What a large life she had led! Raised in Cleveland, she was two years old when her father and uncle, both bootleggers, were murdered in the family driveway due to turf wars. Babette didn’t learn the truth about that (she was told her father had died of pneumonia) until she was twelve and began inhabiting the library where she gained access to old newspaper files and was able to read about what had actually happened.
Later, to escape her overbearing mother, she jumped into marriage to an equally overbearing husband who did his best to control her life and everything she did. It took her a long time to escape the marriage, leave Cleveland and eventually find happiness and freedom by forging a new and satisfying life on her own terms.
She had three husbands, outlived two sons, and went through the tragedy of watching her beloved third husband, JD Hughes, with whom she had moved to Austin, decline and lose his mental faculties to Alzheimer's. As awful as these things were, they made her grow stronger, sharper, and more determined than ever to become a novelist.
She wrote ten books, many of them mysteries, and I believe her final book, 103 Speaks: Reflections on Longevity, a distillation of all the wisdom she had learned in her long life, was her best. Pithy, direct, unswerving. Filled with gems like this: “Fear, I realized, has its own speed, and it is rarely fast enough for the rest of the world.” To me, the book is a deeply rich and gratifying text on how to live your best life and I cannot recommend it highly enough. You can find it on Amazon.
About Babette
Babette Hughes is a centenarian author, journalist, and former fashion model whose life story reads like a cinematic journey through the 20th and 21st centuries. At 103 years old, Babette remains one of the most vibrant and prolific voices in contemporary memoir, having authored ten books—including her celebrated trilogy The Hat, The Scarf, and The Necklace—all written after the age of eighty.
Born into the secrets of the Prohibition era, Babette’s early life was defined by the sudden loss of her father, a mystery she eventually solved by uncovering the truth in dusty library archives: he was a bootlegger murdered by the Mafia. This search for truth became the catalyst for her career as a writer and a "lioness" of independent thought.
Throughout her century of living, Babette has been a witness to—and a participant in—history. She modeled high-fashion hats during the Great Depression, navigated the political storm of the 1968 presidential campaign as a liaison for Hubert Humphrey, and used the transformative power of psychoanalysis to reinvent her life during an era when women were expected to remain silent.
Today, Babette is a vocal advocate for "aging with attitude." A self-described "hospice graduate" who survived a terminal diagnosis at 101, she continues to lift weights twice a week, meditate daily, and dictate her books despite the total loss of her eyesight to macular degeneration. Her work is a testament to the idea that life doesn’t get easier—we just get better at it.
When she isn't "filling the page" with new stories, Babette can be found enjoying a glass of wine, playing cards with friends of all ages, or sharing her original recipes for Fish Soup and Borscht. She lives in Austin, Texas, where she continues to prove that reinvention has no expiration date.
103 Speaks and Babette’s other books are available on Amazon.
The “About Babette” section above is the most recent biography published on her Amazon Author page.