My friend Michele is a recent retiree. Like many retirees, she is finding her post-retirement life filled with more opportunities, projects, meetings, family visits, dreams and plans than perhaps held by her former “working” life. Pursuing her dream to engage full-throttle in the community of books and writers, Michele published her first children’s book, Tales from Shrimps, this past December 2010. She’s now hard at work on her daily blog as well as a fiction novel for adults. Michele comes into the bookstore on a regular basis – for events, for books, and to talk shop.
A couple of months ago, Michele mentioned a new Lorraine Bartlett mystery she’d just read, wondering if I had other readers make the same observation that Michele had. Namely, Michele asked, was anyone else annoyed by the fact that a forty-something author would write with such seeming disdain for her own “older” characters – “and they’re only in their fifties and sixties!” Michelle fumed. Although she admits that she may be extra-sensitive about this issue, I believe Michele voices the frustration of many women “of a certain age” who continue to have active lives.
“I’m not dead!” she insists. “I’m not ready for the nursing home! I’m just recently a grandmother! I’m tired of turning on the TV or flipping through a magazine and seeing people like me represented only in ads for Depends undergarments, hearing aids, diabetes supplies, or life insurance! Ack, don’t get me started on my rants about this!” Actually, though, I am interested in her rant. In our bookstore and in the publishing business, we see more moms and grandmoms turning to young adult romance like Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series, because the characters are fun and the romance is still hot without being tawdry. Yet more than one of these “older” women has asked me for recommendations for “something like” the young adult romances but “not about teenagers.”
Over a decade ago, authors like Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’ Diary), Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City), and Jennifer Weiner (In Her Shoes), forged a new sub-genre known – sometimes derogatorily – as “chick lit”, which offers well-written, sympathetic, fun characters to female readers. These authors paved the way for more books featuring stories predominantly about the lives of contemporary women, written for women who like to read about people who sound like themselves and their friends. Nevertheless, more often than not, most of these books focus on women in their twenties and thirties, struggling with dating, work, a social life (usually in the city), and early marriage. The Baby Boomer women and their younger siblings, while they may find these books amusing, still have slim pickings when looking for fun “chick lit” about chicks dealing with retirement, aging parents, adult children moving home, empty nesting, and their own aging.
Enter author Claire Cook. Not two weeks after I had this conversation with Michele, Claire Cook sent me an advanced reader copy of her latest book, due to be released June 7 of this year, entitled Best Staged Plans. At first, I thought Plans looked like just another cute chick lit book. I was pleased to find not only a new kind of “chick lit” – one I can recommend to my mom and her friends, but one I enjoyed as well. Sandy Sullivan is ready to move to the next stage of life with her husband: they’d dreamed of selling the big New England house that they restored while raising their children, and moving to a fun beach condo. Though she continues doing some business as a home-stager for other people selling their houses, on her own homefront, Sandy’s dream of downsizing is thwarted by the heel-dragging of her adult son who moves back home to inhabit their basement, and her retired husband who is too busy playing tennis and going jogging to help with home repairs.
Frustrated by their lack of cooperation, Sandy decides to fly to Atlanta to help her best friend’s boyfriend redecorate a newly acquired boutique hotel. Since Sandy’s newly-married daughter lives in Atlanta, she plans on having some great girl-time with her daughter, earning some money and professional satisfaction, helping out her best friend, and showing the men of her family her displeasure, but the best-made plans …. Though self-confessed control-freak Sandy is flustered and anxious with the turn of events in Atlanta, in meeting a homeless woman who sleeps under the hotel’s dumpster, Sandy soon finds out that there are much worse life changes than being left alone with an overly-polite son-in-law or dealing with her best friend’s probable cheating boyfriend. Though Best Staged Plans starts out with characters who seemed a little shallow to me (anyone who knows me will tell you, interior decorating is not high on my list of priorities), Cook uses this to pave the way for a gentle but satisfying life lesson to be grateful for what we have.
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