When I first started reading grown up books as a teenager, all the protagonists were much older than me.
I remember thinking it would be a very long time before I’d be the same age as the heroes and heroines of those stories.
Gradually, however, it started to happen. Sometimes I was incredulous, depending on the sort of book it was. Reading about people in their late teens getting married in historical romances seemed very bizarre. As I got older, I kept reading, but I don’t remember noting particularly the age of the various characters in my books. I guess I was pretty busy in my own life, and we were all just “adults” that adult things happened to.
Now that my kids have grown up and left home (“left home”), I have suddenly realised that the books I read are no longer about me. There are no protagonists like me anywhere in popular fiction. Oh no, I tell a lie – I read one book a couple of years ago, written by a Kiwi female author and set in Wellington. It was a sort of supernatural crime fiction where the heroine only came into her inherited superpowers when she went into menopause. Hot flush as power surge. It was great*. I wonder if there’s a sequel? Apart from that, I’m struggling to think of any character at all, let alone the central one.
I guess anyone who doesn’t fit the “normal” mold will probably be saying ‘welcome to my world’ right about now…
ps. I’d forgotten, but this is topical right now because of the return of the “Sex and the City” TV show, now called “And Just Like That”. The returning stars are the subject of abuse and opprobrium online for getting older. And the alternative is?? Unbelievable, you just can’t win! Not even being privileged, white, thin, attractive, and heterosexual can save them.
Strangely enough, I’m least invisible at work, which is probably because it takes so damn long to become a specialist in any branch of medicine. There’s so much to learn that experience means a lot, and we don’t reach our peak until a decade or so before we’re eligible to retire. I remember that was part of the reason why my mum put off retirement as a psychiatrist (apart from the fact that she was still supporting some of her grown up children ahem) – she didn’t want to become entirely invisible. Hey ho, what can you do? Maybe I should retrain as a witch? I wonder if there are any covens nearby with vacancies? Sadly “mad old neighbourhood cat lady” is out, due to allergies.
* with many thanks to the miracle of Google:
