(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
The past, we many of us know all too well, very rarely stays snugs and safely in the past.
Whether we carry past scars with us or the law or estranged family members or a host of other things catch up with us, the past has a way of crashing in – it rarely creeps in, making its presence known with status quo shattering bombasticness – to the present and setting the long-buried cats very much among the pigeons.
In How to Age Disgracefully by Clare Pooley (The Authenticity Project, The People on Platform 5), past and present collide with a gleefully troubling messiness for a disparate group of characters, all while they are trying very much to save a future in jeopardy.
Set in and around Hammersmith in London, How to Age Disgracefully makes a beautifully amusing and often touching case for the fact that dealing with your past, sooner rather than later, is the only way to go if you don’t want a host of complications fouling up your present.
But the idiosyncratically diverse cast of characters that Pooley pulls together in characteristically engaging fashion – she has a knack for making the creation of a found family feel all too human, common and real, in a way that few authors can manage as organically – long ago chose to bury their pasts, thinking that was that, until, of course, it wasn’t and all hell breaks loose.
Could she do it without him?
Of course she could! She’s always been the real brains behind the operation. Not that Jack, or anyone else, would have acknowledged that. And, in any case, this was hardly a complex project, was it? Make some friends. A five-year-old could do it!
Daphne pulled a coat and handbag from the pegs by her front door. She would buy herself a whiteboard and some coloured pens. Then she would construct a plan.
Being a pitch-perfectly wrought Pooley novel, when the present cracks open under the pressure of the past it’s simply the final piece in a long and amusingly moving sequence of events which sees less-than-ideal presents, bolstered and improved by unexpected community, come under threat by once-lived lives coming for their pound of long-delayed flesh.
There’s mayhem and hilarity, and in fact, How to Age Disgracefully begins with events three months hence when everyone’s pasts come rushing out for an airing, much of it unwarranted or unneeded, and you wonder what on earth brought this motley group together and why it is they feel compelled to air a ton of dirty laundry.
Much of the fun of How to Age Disgracefully, and it is a LOT of fun, is finding out not only how everyone comes to be in a minibus on a freeway hurtling to a reality TV show casting, but why it is they feel the need to get things off their chest before they even find out there’s a need to do so.
A love letter to the rich and transformative power of community, friendship and belonging, the novel centres largely on the person of Daphne, an irascible 70-year-old widow of 15 years standing who finally decides, after about 15 years of hermitic seclusion, that she’s going to go out and rejoin the world.
Being a planner and a strategist, she draws up a plan to make this happen and while it’s pretty comprehensive and damn near foolproof, it does have one major flaw – Daphne really doesn’t like people.
(courtesy official Clare Pooley Twitter/X account)
That’s a big problem when you have set yourself the task of finding friends, volunteering and taking up a hobby, and decided to do it by joining a Senior Citizens’ Social Club, one key word of which suggests you aren’t succeed in your clever, whiteboarded plan if you don’t engage with people.
It’s right there in the title, and so reluctantly, and then far more enthusiastically – well, as enthusiastic as Daphne gets; she does soften but good lord just try getting her to admit to that – she lets herself get involved with the likes of almost-hasbeen actor and shoplifter Art, his best friend and retired paparazzo William, yarnbomber Ruby (who admits to nothing), a teenage dad named Ziggy and the convener of the social club, Lydia, who’s trapped in a loveless marriage and who wants to be told she’s worth something after a lifetime being gaslit and belittled by a cruelly inadequate and possibly unfaithful husband.
Daphne’s initial intent is to get as close as she needs to and no further but community is not the sort of thing you can order into the shapes and expression you want, and our grumpy but fearlessly capable septuagenarian soon discovers she’s going to have just go with the flow and do her best to enforce some order, any order, if that’s even possible, into the happy chaos of a found family she didn’t know she needed but which she very much finds.
There was a pause. Daphne was obviously trying to work out how best to express her enthusiasm.
‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous, Ziggy,’ she said. ‘Of course I can’t. What an incredibly stupid idea.’
That was not the reaction he’d expected. But then, nothing about Daphne was what one would expect.
Of course, we all know that Daphne won’t necessarily win in her battle for chaos amidst relational chaos because that’s next to near impossible.
But much of the fun of How to Age Disgracefully is reading as she attempts to do just that and by sheer force of will and a fearlessness that sees her go up against everyone from uncaring councillors to smalltime local drug dealers – initially at first to save the community centre the council wants to close, but eventually becomes she comes to love her unexpected group of friends and found family, not that she’ll admit to that – in order to see justice done and lives made better.
If she atoning for something? Or is it simply that she can’t abide anyone who attempts to do the wrong thing? It’s not immediately clear but suffice to say, Daphne does a lot of combative salvation and redemption in the novel and while she’s only one of many idiosyncratically wonderful characters in a rich diverse ensemble cast, she is easily the passionate beating heart of How to Age Disgracefully and the one whose scenes, and there’s a lot of them, will have you cheering and laughing and sigh with happiness in equal measure.
Pooley has triumphed yet again, and as her beautiful family of characters find their lives changed and outlooks revived and hope restored, you will come to deeply love How to Age Disgracefully which is a redemptive fairytale of sorts but a very real feeling one, grounded in lives broken by the past, limping in the present and desperate for a future that is worth living and joining with others for.