How to Age Disgracefully
by Clare Pooley
GENRE: Contemporary Fiction
When Lydia takes a job running the Senior Citizens’ Social Club three afternoons a week, she assumes she’ll be spending her time drinking tea and playing gentle games of cards.
The members of the Social Club, however, are not at all what Lydia was expecting. From Art, a failed actor turned kleptomaniac to Daphne, who has been hiding from her dark past for decades to Ruby, a Banksy-style knitter who gets revenge in yarn, these seniors look deceptively benign—but when age makes you invisible, secrets are so much easier to hide.
When the city council threatens to sell the doomed community center building, the members of the Social Club join forces with their tiny friends in the daycare next door—as well as the teenaged father of one of the toddlers and a geriatric dog—to save the building. Together, this group’s unorthodox methods may actually work, as long as the police don’t catch up with them first.
Clare Pooley graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge and spent twenty years in the heady world of advertising before becoming a full-time mum.
Realising that her ‘wine o’clock’ habit had spiralled out of control, Clare started writing a blog, Mummy was a Secret Drinker, which has had nearly three million hits. Her memoir, The Sober Diaries was published in 2017 to critical acclaim.
Clare’s debut novel - The Authenticity Project, was inspired by her own experience of exposing the rather grubby truth about her own seemingly perfect life, and is being published in twenty-nine territories in 2020.
Clare’s second novel - The People on Platform 5 (titled Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting in the USA/Canada) was published in spring 2022.
Clare’s third novel - How to Age Disgracefully is out in June 2024.
Clare’s talks include a TEDx talk - ‘Making Sober Less Shameful’, a talk for Radio 4’s Four Thought, and numerous podcast interviews.
Clare lives in Fulham, London with her husband, three children, two border terriers, and an African pygmy hedgehog. - Author's website
Booklist
It is said that it takes a village, but in the London neighborhood of Hammersmith, it really just takes a community center. But sadly, the Mandel Center is struggling, which is very much on point for the few brave souls who launch a seniors’ social club. Its manager, Lydia, a menopausal empty nester withering in a dysfunctional marriage, tries to jolly them with crafts and jigsaw puzzles, but the regulars are too feisty for that. When the local council threatens to demolish the building, Daphne, an enigmatic spitfire with a take-no-prisoners attitude, rallies the regulars in a scheme to not only save the center but also to get revenge on Lydia’s cheating husband. They’re an unlikely cohort—failed actor/recovering kleptomaniac Art; Ruby, who stealthily knits Banksy-style art installations; Anna, a former long-haul trucker who now rocks a motorized mobility scooter; and Ziggy, a teenage father with a daughter at the daycare, whose mad tech skills endear him to the otherwise prickly Daphne. Throw in a madcap bus ride, a mangy dog, and an audition for a reality TV show, and the result is a lovably quirky, reassuringly wise, and memorably inspiring romp that shatters ageist stereotypes. For fans of Fredrik Backman and Rachel Joyce. -- Carol Haggas (Reviewed 5/1/2024)
Publisher's Weekly
Pooley (Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting) charms in this rollicking tale of six wily members of a London Senior Citizens Social Club whose zest for life improves the outlook of their community center’s part-time worker. Lydia takes a job managing their club as respite from her condescending husband, who she suspects is having an affair. She expects docile card games and is surprised to meet such a vigorous group of older people. Among them is Art, a former soap opera actor who keeps himself entertained by shoplifting; Daphne, a busybody who rarely talks to the others and enjoys the “sensation of power that an imbalance of information imbued”; and Ruth, a “small but fierce-looking” knitter whose unauthorized public art earns such headlines as “Mystery Yarn Bomber of Hammersmith Strikes Again!” When the local council decides to sell the community center to a real estate developer, Lydia’s motley crew attempts to block the deal by pulling off various stunts, like sabotaging a meeting between the council and an architect. Along the way, their tenacity helps Lydia rediscover her self-respect. Pooley’s clever and delightfully farcical scenes are laugh-out-loud funny, often thanks to the frank Daphne. This ought to satisfy Pooley’s fans and win her new ones. (June)
Kirkus Reviews
Young and old work together to save a community center at risk of closure in Hammersmith, London.
After hiding in her apartment for 15 years, Daphne starts to feel like she doesn’t want to be invisible anymore. On her 70th birthday, she decides that she’ll find a way to step outside for longer than it takes to buy groceries a couple of times a week. It’s time to make friends and, perhaps, find a partner. She joins a senior citizens’ club that’s starting up at the local community center, and her growing circle soon includes Lydia, 53, a one-time stay-at-home mother who’s trying to fill the empty hours of her day now that her girls are at university; Art, 75, a one-time bit-part actor who has a house but no savings, no jobs, no money to pay for heat, and a shoplifting addiction; Art’s best friend, William, a family man and retired paparazzo; Ziggy, a 17-year-old single dad living on a council estate with his mom, trying to finish school and take care of his 8-month-old daughter, Kylie, while avoiding being sucked into seedy dealings; and a host of others—including an aged mutt dubbed Maggie Thatcher. Fans of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series will enjoy this delightful romp that on its surface is about senior citizens—whom everyone tends to discount—and others coming together to save the local community center but really is about so much more: aging, love, crime, friendship, making mistakes and living through them, and life’s complicated emotions and choices.
A frothy, fun, and well-paced cozy mystery—in which no murders take place. (Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2024).
Sylvia's Second Act
by Hillary Yablon
When sixty-three-year-old Sylvia finds her husband in bed with the floozy of their Boca retirement community, she’s shocked and furious ... at first. By the time her head stops spinning, Sylvia realizes that actually, this isn’t what she wants anymore anyway.
So she enlists her best friend, the glamorous older widow Evie, to join her in setting up a new life in Manhattan. Sylvia’s ex-husband may have lost her life savings, but Sylvia and Evie are scrappy and determined, unopposed to pawning jewelry and roughing it in tiny apartments. And before long, Sylvia signs on to revive her decades-old wedding planning business with a former professional rival. Sylvia has a lot to prove, and beneath it all, she can’t help but wonder: Will she ever be able to get back into the dating game?
Sylvia doesn't want to be twenty-five or thirty again. Her age gives her wisdom, experience, and perspective. A career, sex, fun, and a new romance—her entire second act is stretched out in front of her, beckoning to her. It’s her time, and watch out, world, Sylvia is coming!
The Mostly True Story of Tanner and Louise
by Colleen Oakley
Twenty-one-year-old Tanner Quimby needs a place to live. Preferably one where she can continue sitting around in sweatpants and playing video games nineteen hours a day. Since she has no credit or money to speak of, her options are limited, so when an opportunity to work as a live-in caregiver for an elderly woman falls into her lap, she takes it.
One slip on the rug. That’s all it took for Louise Wilt’s daughter to demand that Louise have a full-time nanny living with her. Never mind that she can still walk fine, finish her daily crossword puzzle, and pour the two fingers of vodka she drinks every afternoon. Bottom line: Louise wants a caretaker even less than Tanner wants to be one.
The two start off their living arrangement happily ignoring each other until Tanner starts to notice things—weird things. Like, why does Louise keep her garden shed locked up tighter than a prison? And why is the local news fixated on the suspect of one of the biggest jewelry heists in American history who looks eerily like Louise? And why does Louise suddenly appear in her room, with a packed bag at 1 a.m. insisting that they leave town immediately?
Thus begins the story of a not-to-be-underestimated elderly woman and an aimless young woman who—if they can outrun the mistakes of their past—might just have the greatest adventure of their lives.
Nosy Neighbors
by Freya Sampson
Nothing brings neighbors together like someone else’s secrets… At Shelley House, the walls have ears, and they’re attached to a ragtag duo of busybodies ready to pry, snoop, and generally annoy their neighbors into solving a crime.
Seventy-seven-year-old Dorothy Darling has lived in Shelley House longer than any of the other residents, and if you take their word for it, she’s as cantankerous as they come. But Dorothy has her reasons for spying. And none of them require justifying herself to Kat Bennett.
Twenty-five-year-old Kat has never known a place where she felt truly at home, and crumbling Shelley House is no different. Her neighbors find her prickly and unapproachable, but beneath her tough exterior, Kat’s plagued by a guilty secret from her past.
When their apartments face demolition, sworn enemies Kat and Dorothy agree on just one thing: they must save their historic building. But when someone plays dirty—and one of the residents is viciously taken down—Dorothy and Kat seek justice. The police close the investigation too soon, leaving it up to the unlikely amateur sleuths—with a playful Jack Russell terrier at their side—to restore peace in their community.
