I spoke to the interested and interesting British author Clare Pooley about her latest novel, How to Age Disgracefully. Clare’s fourth book is an uplifting hysterical read with lovable characters who say funny things or think funny thoughts all the time. People Magazine called her book an ‘uproarious romp’. It’s a crazy story of seniors, toddlers, a teenage single dad, a kleptomaniac, a yarn bomber and a mutt named Maggie Thatcher, who somehow all come together to save their community centre in Hammersmith in London. Clare tackles myths about old people being boring and despondent. Wait until you meet septuagenarian firecracker Daphne who uses her cane to move people out of the way.
Clare also shows how friendships with people younger and older can be life enhancing and the importance of finding your own community. She does this in a light, never preachy, often funny way that leaves readers, or at least this reader, feeling a bit better about the world. My Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity. You can listen to the full interview here on my podcast Elena Meets the Author.
Can you briefly tell us about the path that led you to become a novelist at age 50?
When I was younger, I dreamed of being a novelist. From the moment I discovered stories, I wanted to be able to write them. That was my great dream. But life gets in the way. I worked in advertising for 20 years.
I wrote nothing apart from PowerPoint presentations and emails and shopping lists. And then in 2015 I got to the point where I realized that my life was going seriously off track because I had picked up a rather major dependency on alcohol and my wine o’clock habit was completely out of control.
I was drinking about 10 bottles of wine a week, which is way too much. I mean, that’s way over the government guidelines and it was having all sorts of impacts on my life. So, I knew I had to quit drinking, but I was too embarrassed and ashamed about the situation I found myself in to talk to anybody about it.
I didn’t talk to my doctor. I didn’t talk to my husband. I didn’t talk to my friends. What I did do because I needed some form of therapy was I started an anonymous blog, and I called it Mummy was a Secret Drinker. I wrote in that blog every day. I wrote about what I was going through and all the research I’d been doing and how I was feeling. That blog went viral and then became a memoir called The Sober Diaries, which was published at the beginning of 2018.
And by this stage, my new addiction was writing, and I really didn’t want to stop writing. I absolutely loved it. But I didn’t want to carry on writing about my own life, so I thought I’d try writing about imaginary people instead. And that became my whole new career.
You wrote a wonderful blog about how author Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird, motivated you to keep writing your first book. In a nutshell, for those who haven’t read Anne’s book, can you explain how it applies to so many of life’s challenges?
I love that book. And funny enough, Anne Lamott doesn’t drink either. She quit drinking many years ago. She writes that the expression ‘bird by bird’ comes from a story from her childhood where her little brother had a complete meltdown one evening because he suddenly realized that he had a school project due the next day and he hadn’t done any of it.
He was supposed to have spent the previous semester working on this project about birds. He was supposed to cover I don’t know, 20, 30 different birds. And he was completely beside himself in floods of tears.
He said to his father, ‘I can’t do it. This is the end of my school career. I’m going to be in such trouble.’ And his father sat him down. He said, ‘Now don’t panic. We’ll just take it bird by bird, buddy.’ And they did. They took it bird by bird. And by the end of the night, they had a whole project on birds to hand in.
Anne talks about how writing a novel is very much like that. If you worry about having to produce 100,000 words, the whole thing can seem overwhelming. But if you just think about each page, each chapter, or even each paragraph, you just take it bird by bird, within a relatively short period of time, you find that you’ve got a whole novel.
And giving up alcohol is absolutely about bird by bird. The Alcoholics Anonymous expression of one day at a time, is absolutely what gets you through addiction. If you worry about, can I stop drinking forever? You’ll never even take the first step. If you think, can I stop drinking just for today? The answer to that is always yes. Can I just write about one bird? Yes, of course you can. If you write about one bird enough times, you’ve got a whole project. If you write one chapter enough times, you’ve got a whole novel. If you have one day without drinking enough times, you’ve been sober for a decade.
It’s a really good lesson. Breaking things down to just one little task at a time rather than thinking of something as a humongous project. I have a Post-it taped to my desktop that says, Bird by bird buddy.
Oh, brilliant. It’s good for teenagers as well. If you have young people in your life who are struggling, just saying to them, ‘Look, can you make it through until the end of tomorrow? And if you can do that, you can make it through to the end of the following day and the end of the day after that.’ It helps the whole world stop feeling overwhelming.
Do you know anyone like Daphne, your principal character who at age 70, is sharp, chic, feisty, opinionated, and as witty as they come, an original with a fabulous, checkered past? I want to be Daphne when I grow up. But are there people you modelled her after?
She’s modelled after the sort of woman I want to be when I’m 70. She isn’t modelled after any one particular person, but she’s modelled after an amalgamation of characteristics that I found aspirational.
At the beginning of the book, Daphne’s not really a very nice person. She’s very spiky. She doesn’t like other people. She’s very critical of everybody around her. And she doesn’t have any friends. She thinks she’s slightly better than everyone else. In many ways, you wouldn’t want to know somebody like Daphne.
I wanted to explore how even the most unlikable people in the right circumstances can be magnificent. And by the end, I think everybody is rooting for Daphne and she’s great, but it’s not where she starts off. She’s certainly not perfect, But I think the most interesting people aren’t perfect.
I liked that even at the beginning when Daphne was unpleasant and snooty, she was always funny. And had a plan. I never felt sorry for her.
I’m really pleased about that because that was exactly what I wanted to avoid. With older characters in novels, you are encouraged to feel pity for them, and I didn’t want anyone to pity my characters. They’re often in quite precarious situations, and they’re not always the nicest people, but they’ve all got agency.
Daphne does yoga and Pilates every day. And she’s very strong for her age and she carries a walking stick, not because she needs a walking stick to walk with, but because she uses it as a weapon, and she uses it to clear people out of her way if necessary.
The rest of the Q&A can be found here on 26, a UK site to promote the joy of words.
Happy Summer
July 2024
