NOT YOUR NORMAL SENIOR CITIZENS: HOW TO AGE DISGRACEFULLY

I have to confess: I want to grow up to be Daphne “Smith” in How to Age Disgracefully, by Clare Pooley, though I suspect I’m already too late to achieve her style and her panache (not to mention her backstory).  While there are other wonderful characters in this book, from Lydia, the middle aged woman who’s “running” the local senior center (“running” in quotes because she’s far from in charge for most of the book), to Art, the former actor and current kleptomaniac, to Ziggy, the teenage single father, it’s really Daphne who’s the heart and soul of the book, who makes things happen, and what a fabulous person she is!

The book is tremendous fun, even more fun than the description of the plot might suggest.  In fact, you might read the summary of the plot and think you’ve read this story before, or seen it in a dozen Hallmark movies, but trust me, you haven’t. Sure, there’s a building that’s a combined senior citizen center and day care (already you’re thinking it’s too cute for words, but stay with me here), and the building is in imminent danger of being sold by the city to a private buyer who’s interested in making condominiums from it, and sure, the senior citizens join forces and work with the children in the day care (not to mention a dog who’s passed around among three characters) to save the building, and that all feels like a cliche, but what lifts this plot above the banal is the characters and the unique way they interact to make this happen.

The building is in bad shape to begin with. When the ceiling falls in on one of the senior citizens, one who’s in a wheelchair, no less, and she subsequently dies (not, as it turns out, from the impact with the ceiling, though that hardly matters), the local council decides the building has to go, never mind how many different groups need and depend on it.  It’s possible that the council had already made a deal with a developer to sell the building, but the disaster just makes it easier for them to justify it.

While the rest of the oddball group of seniors, and Lydia, who’s only just started running the program and is seriously lacking in self-esteem, seem resigned to the thought that this place is going to be sold out from under them, Daphne is not about to stand by and be resigned to anything.  She has just turned 70 and has just started to emerge from her self-imposed isolation, and she has her goal of making friends written on her whiteboard at home, and she is determined that she’s not going to have her best chance of integrating into society ripped out from under her.  

When you first meet Daphne, you could be excused for thinking she’s the equivalent of one of Fredrik Backman’s irascible old ladies (a la Britt Marie), someone who’s shut herself away from the world and needs to warm up and discover love and friendship again. She is, after all, irascible, blunt to a fault, and wildly opinionated.  She has no family, no friends, and no connections to anyone outside of her beautiful home.  And I have to say that she does change over the course of the book, opening up to other people, getting involved in their problems and solving them in her own unique way (and I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the fun by describing what her unique way involves), but do not expect her to turn into a sweet old lady no matter how much she becomes entangled in other people’s lives.

Her energy pervades the book and provides a lot of the humor and liveliness of the plot.  Yes, the seniors work with the day care kids to perform a nativity play that the council members come to watch, in the hopes that they’ll be sufficiently charmed or shamed that they’ll keep the building, but this goes sideways in a hilarious and painful way. And yes, there is a television show with a prize that’s large enough to pay for the needed repairs and maintenance of the building, and Art trains Maggie, the dog (also known as Margaret Thatcher, Margaret and M, depending on who’s taking care of her), so they can perform in this show and hopefully win, but this doesn’t quite go the way anyone expects either.  And yes, Lydia gets revenge on her patronizing and philandering husband with the help of the group, but that, too – engineered by Daphne – is unlike any other kind of wifely revenge you’ve seen before.

You know a book like this is going to have a happy ending, but you don’t know exactly how you’re going to get there, given the characters involved.  That’s also part of the fun.  Once you put yourself in Daphne’s all too capable hands and launch yourself into this book, you’ll be in for a great time, lots of laughs and twists and turns before you reach the satisfying climax.  You’ll probably want to age as disgracefully as these characters yourself, especially Daphne. 

DOES ANYONE KNOW ANYONE ELSE? THE AUTHENTICITY PROJECT

The premise of The Authenticity Project, by Clare Pooley, is very simple: we all lead lives where we’re playing different parts, and we never show people our real selves.  What would happen if we told some of those deepest secrets?  What if we could do it more or less anonymously?

When you start reading The Authenticity Project, you think you know who these stereotypical people are: there’s Monica, who owns the local coffee shop and is kind of uptight, there’s Julian, the dissipated once famous artist who’s all by himself now, there’s Hazard, the prototypical high rolling finance guy who spends his days and nights drinking and snorting cocaine and sleeping with anyone who’ll have him, there’s Riley, the sweet Australian surfer, there’s Alice, the young mother who’s created an idealized version of her life on Instagram but is having a lot of trouble dealing with actual parenthood. 

Julian leaves a notebook in the coffee shop he frequents, in which he wrote an introduction, asking what would happen if people told the truth about their lives, the one unknown truth that would make sense of what they’re really all about, and then demonstrated what kind of truth that would be by writing about his own life, leaving plenty of room for other people to write their truths as well.  Everybody does, one at a time, finding the book and adding their truths to it.

One of the cool things the author does is to show you the character writing in the book, but not showing you what they’re writing until you’re in the point of view of another character reading the book, so you not only get the one character’s secret, you get to see how the next character reacts to that secret.

At first, the secrets written in the book seem pretty obvious: the workaholic wants a family, the artist is lonely after the death of his unappreciated wife, the addict realizes he’s an addict, etc.  The book works because, just as the original stereotypes don’t give you the whole person, the secrets they write about themselves don’t give you the whole person either.  Each character is more than they originally seem, and more than they think they are, and we get to watch them in action and see them in full.  

This is not a book that works by surprising the reader. There are one or two slight plot twists, but you can guess most of the major developments long in advance.  And that’s all right. It’s not a book about plot as much as it is about characters, about ordinary seeming people finding and creating a community, revealing to themselves and each other what kind of people they really are.  I found them all ultimately lovable, and cared about what happened to them and whether they would get their happy endings they deserved.

If you want a good-hearted read, with humor and charm, definitely check out The Authenticity Project.