\u201cYou will get paid to read and review current fiction if it has a compelling story with an aging protagonist.\u201d Sounds like a good news-bad news joke, right? I love fiction, I told my boss, but the thought of reading novels starring an older person was filling me with dread. I’m in my mid-50s. I found the assignment depressing.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou want me to read hen lit?\u201d I asked Kay Klotzburger, president of the Silver Century Foundation. Hen lit is women’s fiction not unlike chick lit, but written for women of a certain age. If you think that term is bad, in the United Kingdom, light narratives with a female protagonist 40 and older are called matron lit\u2014as if I’d be reading that.<\/p>\n
My hesitation was not only my very slight case of snobbery when it comes to my fiction choices, but because I just could not imagine how a plot centered on the life of an older man or woman could be remotely interesting.<\/p>\n
And that, my fellow readers, is where I was so wrong. In fact, I have thoroughly enjoyed several books that my heretofore preconception would have had me miss.<\/p>\n
Olive Kitteridge<\/em> (2008) by Elizabeth Strout was the first one. Olive is cantankerous, but not to the point of ludicrousness. I hate to admit it, but I have more than a little Olive in me. She touched on those personality traits I’d rather not own.<\/p>\n I would propose marriage to the retired military man of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand<\/em> (2010) by Helen Simonson. I could live a quaint life in his very British country home. Defying stereotype, he falls for a woman from Pakistan and irks his ungrateful, pretentious son.<\/p>\n I rooted for Percy Darling in Julia Glass’ The Widower’s Tale<\/em>, (2011); he deserved better. And I was 100 percent behind John and Ella as they went AWOL for one last RV ride in Michael Zadoorian\u2019s The Leisure Seeker <\/em>(2009).<\/p>\n An author brave enough to write about a woman slipping slow motion into dementia took me by surprise. I thought Turn of Mind<\/em> (2012), a thriller by Alice LaPlante, would be too depressing to read, yet my heart ached for the protagonist, so real was her fight, courage and grace.<\/p>\n I couldn’t imagine how the minutiae of the life of an 80-year-old widow would be worth my time. Emily, Alone<\/em> (2011), by Stewart O’Nan, truly moved me. How does a 50-year-old engineer nail a character as complex as Emily?<\/p>\n These authors\u2014and, I am now convinced, others\u2014have done what I thought was impossible. They opened my eyes to the richness of later life. I have been left with an idea of what my older friends and family members are going through or what they may have already experienced. Perhaps I can say I know them a little better for the reading I have been assigned.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cYou will get paid to read and review current fiction if it has a compelling story with an aging protagonist.\u201d Sounds like a good news-bad news joke, right?<\/p>\n