Who better to ask for relationship advice than a woman whose marriage lasted 73 years?
Barbara “Cutie” Cooper, the feisty and funny 96-year-old who blogs, tweets, posts to YouTube and Facebook, has been taking questions for years.
The Los Angeles-based font of wisdom even has time for old-school media: she’s written a book with her two granddaughters. It’s called “Fall In Love For Life: Inspiration from a 73-Year Marriage.”
And that’s where you’ll find some nuggets of her grandmotherly wisdom on love and loss and finding a long-term mate.
“Even if you don’t feel as in touch with your intuition as I do, the truth is that in love and in friendship, your heart will tell you – if you will just left it,” she writes.
Cooper’s book, written with granddaughters Kim Cooper and Chinta Cooper, details her life with her husband, Harry “Pop Pop” Cooper, who died in 2010 at age 98. The pair lived for many years in Boyle Heights on the eastside of Los Angeles.
After Harry became very ill, the granddaughters teamed up to keep the still-spry Cutie active by writing the book together.
As a couple, the Coopers, in their 90s, had already become a bit of a YouTube sensation when they begun blogging together at “the Original Grandparents,” or “the OGs.”
“As soon as we turned the camera on them … they just turned into these amazing characters,” granddaughter Kim Cooper said. “They were just more.”
But when Harry took a turn for the worse, the granddaughters wanted to keep Cutie from becoming sick too. So they drew the details of the couple’s 73-year-marriage out of Cutie and plotted to write a book.
The 208-page volume shows she’s a realist who tells it straight.
The message is: “If you have to ask yourself if he’s the right guy, he’s not.”
“She just says, ‘Move on; there’s better out there,'” Kim Cooper says. “She doesn’t have a lot of patience with guys who don’t make women happy.”
Cutie isn’t much of one for a phone interview, so NBC4 didn’t get to talk to her for this story. But Kim Cooper, a music critic who also runs a company that gives tours of historic sites in Los Angeles, clearly adores her grandmother and is eager to share about her exploits.
“She’s irrepressible,” Cooper said. “She’s mischievous; she’s sassy. She’s not even 5 feet tall.”
In addition to many appearances in press and on television, Cutie can now claim to be a bestseller on Amazon.com too.
Read more: NBC
