It strikes you at random, the loss of youth. And I don’t mean those glimpses through shop windows of some portly, wild-haired shopper who turns out to be your own reflection – no, I’m talking about the thunderbolts of violent existential crisis.
Like the one that knocked me for six when watching the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Connell was visiting Marianne at her holiday villa in Italy and the ravishing early-20s twosome were clattering about happily on their bikes when I was struck by a pain so profound I would have sunk to my knees had I not been lying on the sofa tucked under a throw.
I’ll never freewheel like that again, I thought. At least not without needing to get off constantly to adjust the saddle or search for a loo. The best remedy for mourning youth is your bookshelf, specifically classic gems with a fierce female protagonist of a certain age.
The frontrunner for me is Winifred Watson’s Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day. When Guinevere Pettigrew, late 40s and near-destitute, stumbles by chance into the realm of the glamorous young Delysia, she’s unexpectedly afforded the opportunity to deploy the wisdom of her greater years. Before the day is out, she’s enjoying both a style makeover and a longed-for romance – pure bliss for both her and us.
For more modern midlife heroines, look no further than your Anne Tyler collection, especially her Pulitzer-winning Breathing Lessons, in which well-meaning meddler Maggie Moran takes a road trip with her husband and finds herself on a personal journey to forgiveness, acceptance and hope. This novel is such a tonic for weary female souls it should be available at the chemist’s.
Ready for a vixen? Writing A Neighbour’s Guide To Murder, I became aware of Notes On A Scandal vibes, of echoes of Zoë Heller’s deliciously manipulative sixtysomething narrator, Barbara Covett, in my 70-year-old Gwen. Recognising in the mistakes of her younger, more glamorous colleague Sheba an opportunity to influence events – perhaps even profit from them – Barbara proceeds to wreak merry hell in her community. Hard to read at times, but there’s something exhilarating, even redemptive, about her refusal to be sidelined by a society that dismisses older women wholesale.
If in doubt, there’s always Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple. I thought of her last week when in my local posh bakery. An entitled millennial male in Lycra shouldered past me, behaving as if I didn’t exist, before flirting with the young female barista. "I’m an ordinary, rather scatty old lady," Jane muses in The Murder At The Vicarage, her debut airing and my favourite. "And that of course is very good camouflage. You see, we’re only disguised as being past our best; inside, the flame burns as bright as ever."
My last recommendation is a youthquake classic that inspires joie de vivre – The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy, given to me by my first boss when I was in my 20s and she her 40s (we’re still friends 35 years later). Heroine Sally Jay Gorce is a young graduate in 1950s Paris, whirling down boulevards and surrendering to seductions without a thought for the adult compromises that lie beyond. ‘The world is wide, wide, wide,’ she declares, ‘and I am young, young, young, and we’re all going to live forever!’ Well, you are, Sally Jay, I’m sure of it.
A Neighbour’s Guide To Murder (HarperCollins) by Louise Candlish is out now
