In 1972 the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, then 62, published her book The Coming of Age to “break the conspiracy of silence” surrounding ageing. In it she argued that old age is culturally defined, arriving at different moments in the human life cycle depending on the time and place. “Society,” she wrote, “looks upon old age as a kind of shameful secret that it is unseemly to mention.” As a result, ageing is notably absent from literature, and many find it easier to imagine death: “in the old person that we must become, we refuse to recognise ourselves”.
Almost 60 years later our essential attitude towards ageing has not changed – at least according to the Australian writers Trish Bolton, Annie de Monchaux and Jane Tara. Their novels, all released this year, consider the experience of ageing as women in a cultural context that would prefer it happened out of sight.
Bolton’s first novel, Whenever You’re Ready, which came out in January, is a story about three female friends in their 70s; the inspiration came from her own experience of ageing and a desire to see herself on the page. “To grow old is seen as something shameful,” Bolton tells Guardian Australia. “It’s seen as something we should try to avoid, instead of a privilege. There are very few stories about women in their 50s, 60s and 70s. When ageism and sexism merge, the two things that women are valued for – their beauty and their fertility – have disappeared.”
Bolton sees her story as a rejoinder to the depiction of older women as “grandmotherly”. It opens with one woman’s carefully considered suicide after a terminal diagnosis. Another chapter describes – without judgment – a woman in her 70s spending her precarious income being pampered by a sex worker, despite being at risk of homelessness. “I wanted to get across that women at any age still have to deal with big things and lead interesting lives,” she says. “We are not the old biddy who has nothing to do but make marmalade.”
They aren’t the only Australian novels drawing attention to ageing. Bruce Nash’s All the Words We Know, released in March, follows an elderly woman with dementia in an aged care facility; and The Little Clothes by Deborah Callaghan, out in June, accelerates the anxiety by a few decades and asks: “When you are heading towards 40 … what do you do with your new powers of invisibility?”
Jane Tara’s novel Tilda Is Visible, released in February, also tackles what pop psychology dubs “invisible woman syndrome”: the phenomenon whereby ageing women suddenly feel overlooked everywhere from the workplace to the coffee queue. Tara literalises the syndrome: her protagonist gradually fades from view, one body part at a time. She’s still there, her doctors and support group reassure her, it’s just that soon no one will be able to see her.
Though the premise is comic, Tara, like Bolton, wrote from her own, sometimes anguished experience. At 45 she’d already been feeling old, exhausted and self-critical when she looked in the mirror, and overlooked in all areas of life. Then she received a further blow – a misdiagnosis of a degenerative eye condition.
“I looked in the mirror one day and had a total shift in perception in the way that I looked at myself,” she says. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, am I not going to see myself age?’ I felt grief stricken, actually, like I was losing a great gift … This gave me the idea of a woman who can’t see herself clearly. Because if you can’t see yourself, who else is going to?”
In the opening scene of Annie de Monchaux’s novel Audrey’s Gone Awol, coming this month, the eponymous Audrey tells her therapist “I got married, had children, and then became invisible. It suited everyone, until it didn’t.”
De Monchaux describes the book as “a coming of middle-age story where one woman approaches her sense of invisibility in plain sight”. As with Tilda, Audrey’s character arc involves reckoning with the injustices of feeling old and overlooked before finding hope for new ways to live once you’ve aged off the social script.
“I think we all agree that invisibility is a feeling,” de Monchaux says. “It probably emanates from our limbic region along with fight and flight.” She thinks that women particularly fade from view at the intersection of ageing and motherhood.
“When you have [children] you are putting one, two, three, however many people into the space where there used to be one. You might find you don’t have a place in your own life. After children you find your voice again. Instead of saying, ‘Don’t put the banana in the CD player,’ you start to say more interesting things. You’ve suddenly got more time but everyone is just walking by you. You’re covered in wrinkles. You’re no longer interesting.”
This perception, Bolton believes, is why even older writers shy from writing older characters, despite the “sea of grey hair” at writer’s festivals. “They think, ‘I’m too old to be interesting. If I’m not interesting, then why would a book about my life be interesting?’”
For de Beauvoir, the problem of ageing was not only interesting but inherently political, demanding collective action. “It is to the interest of the exploiting class to destroy the solidarity between the workers and the unproductive old,” she wrote.
But in the neoliberal scenes of de Monchaux and Tara’s novels, no one’s overthrowing the capitalistic structures and patriarchal logic that dehumanises them; the protagonists turn to therapy, self-love and meditation instead. Tilda gets a haircut and a new ’fit. Audrey goes to France and has a blast. They both hang out more with their friends. The most important thing, according to these books, isn’t to fight the power but to keep living your best life despite it.
It’s a resolution that fits with their authors’ experiences. While ageism is real, and invisibility creeps up, they want everyone to remember there’s still fun to be had. “At this age you discover that doing isn’t being,” de Monchaux says. “You get rid of lists, perhaps, where you measured the value of your day. So I think it’s a tremendous time to be authentic and happy. It’s not better but it’s as good.”
Tara says: “In the last 10 years I’ve gone on this journey where I’ve seen myself for the first time.” Like Tilda, she needed to feel she was disappearing to look at life from another angle.
Whenever You’re Ready by Trish Bolton is out now (Allen & Unwin, $32.99), as is Tilda Is Visible by Jane Tara (Affirm, $34.99); Audrey Goes Awol by Annie de Monchaux is out in April (Ultimo, $34.99) and The Little Clothes by Deborah Callaghan is out on 11 June (Penguin, $34.99).
