I was at a crime book festival in the UK a couple of years ago, when I first became aware of something odd in the thriller world. The author on stage was talking about the main protagonists of her new book: forty-something, two kids. I couldn’t help feeling a hot wave of irritation (like any self-respecting fifty-year-old) because the author was in her fifties. Yet she was reaching down through the years to convey voices that had belonged to her a decade ago. It felt like literary Botox to me, not that that’s illegal or even wrong.
Yet this small, seemingly meaningless fact niggled me for ages. I had just started writing my thriller, The Younger Woman, featuring a fifty-something female protagonist, and was worried I was going to be standing there alone with my dishevelled mid-life flag. Because the sad truth was that the author at the crime festival wasn’t the only one inverting her viewpoint and age. Far from it. Psychological thrillers typically feature female main characters aged thirty-forty-something with young kids in tow. Some protagonists are younger still – twenties, teens – increasing their perceived vulnerability.
We can write what we like – that’s the beauty of fiction. I’m not advocating that everyone writes exactly who they are, at their exact point in life, because that would be boring, limiting. But if it’s vulnerability that we’re after in our female protagonists, as we so often are in thrillers, then there’s barely a more vulnerable time than during your fifties, whether you have two kids or none.
No matter your domestic set up, menopause rages on indiscriminately. The great leveller, it’s rife with equality and is universally relatable. Because even if you haven’t been through it yet, or never will because of your birth-assigned gender or health circumstances, then you will know someone who has. We don’t have to experience the horror of the world wars to keep those stories alive – to be invested or moved. I didn’t have to be a young boy from Mississippi to enjoy reading Huck Finn, or a German Jew to relate to Anne Frank. I found both stories relatable, despite being very different to my own life experiences.
So, ignoring the alarm bells, I set about writing The Younger Woman, determined to give my hot mess of a fifty-year-old the story and platform she deserved. I tried to quell the fear that I was leaving the safe nucleus of young married woman, two kids. But maybe even that wasn’t as safe as it seemed. After all, one reviewer of my previous book, Good Husbands, said they enjoyed it, even though they “avoided books about older women.” The protagonists were thirty-forty years old, right bang in the safe zone. Perhaps I needed to rethink what old meant to some people.
Put bluntly, old is anything that isn’t young. Our culture loves youth, and fiction feeds society, giving it what it wants. No one can afford to be perceived as out of date in our tech-driven culture. Young is intrinsically more exciting and always trumps old.
Yet even seniors have won their spotlight in mainstream fiction. First, there was The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. And then the phenomenally successful, Richard Osman. Crime had long held a torch to the elderly, from Miss Marple to Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote, so it was only natural that retirees would return to centre stage in a big way. Osman’s debut, The Thursday Murder Club, features seniors in a retirement village. Only fifty-four himself, he leapfrogged several decades, deftly bypassing the no-man’s-land of mid-life.
As was his right and always will be his right. But if fifty-year-olds are writing about thirty-somethings or eighty-somethings, then who’s writing about fifty-year-olds? Because it’s important that someone does, especially in the psychological thriller space with its huge female readership. Otherwise we’ll have no stories for midlife women to relate to. No stories for the women fast approaching that decade. No stories for younger women to make sense of their future. And no stories for the men of all ages – husbands, sons, friends, bosses, law-makers – who could support women during this time, or simply learn what their mothers experienced, the way I learnt what Huck Finn or Anne Frank experienced.
But change is happening, the way it always does when a segment of society is ignored for too long. Pioneering women are starting to speak up about mid-life, ageing and the menopause. Brooke Shields is Not Allowed to Get Old was released recently, an empowering memoir about ageism; and Hollywood is starting to take note, with thrillers such as the trope-flipping Babygirl starring Nicole Kidman hitting big screens.
Psychological suspense may be slow to evolve, but progress is underway. It’s a tricky genre to bend – full of boundaries and tropes. Readers expect certain things to happen in a certain way. Yet it’s also about relatability, which is why it must showcase a whole spectrum of experiences, not just the same chosen few.
So, yes, psychological thrillers are finally opening the doors to middle-aged women, who have so much to give and say. Emotional, weather-worn, but still full of vitality, we want to live and love, just like everyone else. And I couldn’t think of a better place for them to do it than within a thriller because no one is pushed to the brink like a menopausal woman. And no one can fight for her life like her either.
I recently read a publisher’s post on Instagram saying that if you wanted to know how it felt to be a young woman in Britain today, this book was it. I live for the day when someone says the same thing about old women – or just old-er. Old-ish.
Fifty-something, to be exact.
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