FABULOUS AND FORTY-SOMETHING by Linda Gillard

Dorothy L Sayers
Fabulous and dead

"Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.” Dorothy L Sayers.
 

When ill health forced me to give up teaching some years ago, I used my convalescence to catch up on reading. This was 2000 and bookshops were awash with chick-lit. (Jane Austen and vampires hadn’t yet been discovered by the marketing men.) As I was forty-seven, with only a limited interest in shopping, shoes and handbags, I struggled to find commercial fiction that reflected my taste or even my life. Few novels featured women of my age centre stage. Romantic heroines over forty simply didn’t exist. Mature women appeared only as somebody’s mother or somebody’s wife and they never had sex (unless it was for comic effect.) 

LINDA GILLARD
Fabulous and 50-something

So I gave up looking and decided to write a book for myself, the sort of thing I wanted to read, but couldn’t find: a thinking-woman’s love story that dealt with some serious issues, had believable characters and (of course) a gorgeous, complex hero. I put a vulnerable, creative woman in the spotlight, ignored her age and just looked at her heart and mind. (And so did my hero.)

As a matter of principle I made my heroine forty-seven - my own age. This was commercial suicide in terms of finding a publisher, but I didn’t care, I was just writing to amuse myself. And I did. I had a whale of a time writing an off-beat love story about a sexy, middle-aged textile artist and a fragile younger man who was a teacher and poet. I set their love story on the bleak but beautiful Hebridean island of North Uist, a place I knew well from family holidays.

Encouraged by my online writing group, I found an agent, then a publisher for what was to become my first novel, EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY - long out of print, but now available again on Kindle for a mere 86p.

My first novel.
86p/$1.99 on Kindle

EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY was originally published in 2005 by Transita, a fiction imprint aimed at mature women. Their middle-aged heroines were a hit with female readers of all ages, but the books were dismissed by the media as “Romance for Wrinklies”, “HRT lit”, even “hag lit”.  On Radio 4 Mariella Frostrup referred to the new imprint as "frump lit". (The ageism and misogyny of British culture beggars belief - but hey, they used to burn us as witches, so things are looking up.)

When EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY was published a serious young journalist from a serious Sunday newspaper asked me why I hadn't made my middle-aged romantic heroine twenty-five, since this would have made it easier for me to find a publisher. I explained that I hadn't been very interested in a 25 year-old's take on life because I was nearly fifty. (Young people don’t seem to realise that 25 year-olds are only fascinating to other 25 year-olds.)

After EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY, I wrote more novels with heroines in their 40s and 50s and, to my surprise, this aspect of the books has appealed to readers of all ages. Many young women have written to me to say how refreshing it was to read about older women for a change, women who presented positive role models.

Diana Athill - Fabulous and 93

Female readers have been fobbed off for far too long with fiction about women under thirty. What is this obsession with youth? Most books are bought and read by women over forty. Why do publishers think female readers want stories about much younger women? Think of  the success Diana Athill has recently enjoyed with her memoirs and short stories. Readers can't get enough. Why? Because mature women have really lived. Their lives have been full and varied, sometimes exciting, often tragic. Women who’ve been around the block a few times have collected some interesting souvenirs, not to mention a few scars and they have wonderful tales to tell. I like to think I write fiction that reflects this.

Currently on offer - 99p/$0.99

Standing at a bus stop one day, I was chatting to a minister’s wife. She said to me wearily, “I’m over fifty. I need to slow down.” I smiled sympathetically, but what actually went through my mind was, “I’m over fifty. I need to speed up.”

Time waits for no (wo)man. I still have a lot of living to do. And so do my heroines.

                                           ~~~~

Linda Gillard has three indie e-books on Kindle: EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY, HOUSE OF SILENCE and UNTYING THE KNOT. She will be publishing a fourth, A LIFETIME BURNING in January 2012. 

EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY has just been selected for the reading list of the bloggers' Mental Illness Advocacy Reading Challenge 2012 

You can find Linda's website here and her Facebook author page here.