Tag: Clare Pooley

How to Age Disgracefully by Clare Pooley (Fiction)

I loved this book. It was hysterically funny and I found myself laughing out loud on almost every page, multiple times on some. I definitely got some looks on the subway.

A community center housing a senior citizens social club and a daycare is threatened with closure when the board gets greedy for development money rather than making the effort to fundraise for repairs. But the senior citizens (and one desperate teen father) will do anything to keep that from happening and come up with some pretty interesting long shot ideas. FYI these are not senior citizens living up to society’s (pallid) expectations! We’ve got the larger than life Daphne whose future is bleak but whose past was “extraordinarily colorful;” Art, the actor who specializes in playing dead bodies while managing a small kleptomania problem; Ruby, the Banksy of knitting; Anna, the ex-trucker with quite a number of dead husbands to her credit; and William, the retired Paparazzo who puts his (IMHO sleazy) skills into useful practice. All supposedly organized by the 50 something Lydia, whose life has been drained of purpose but filled by an utter a*hole of a hubby. There is something very appealing about old cranky people getting a new lease on life, and this intensely uplifting book has that in spades.

I loved the characters (a teen father? how often does that happen?), loved the humor and excellent writing, and loved the random thoughts on aging — like how to take advantage of the apparent invisibility of the aged for your personal aging benefit. I loved the author’s note where she claimed she still did not feel like a “grown up” despite her “advanced” age — I so relate to that! Lastly, I loved the reference to the Dylan Thomas poem “Do not go gently into that good night.” How many times have I heard of that poem without ever bothering to actually read it and think about what it means? Here are the first lines:

Do not go gentle into that good night 
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

There is more — it is good — go read it if you haven’t …

Some great quotes — only a tiny fraction!
“She appeared to have jumped out of the frying pan of sexism and into the fire of ageism. The final frontier of isms.“

“There was nothing better than listening to someone else’s guilty conscience being offloaded.”

“Her comfort zone was exceedingly spacious, but this experience lay well outside of it.”

“She needed to turn over a new leaf. Become an entirely new plant, even.”

“Despite her age, Daphne seemed to have the hearing of an adolescent bat.”

“Why on earth, when there were so many more important things they could be teaching their children, would parents waste their time reading stories about an insect with a dysfunctional relationship with food?” (about the Hungry Caterpillar)

“Daphne wrote texts, he’d discovered, just the way she spoke in proper full sentences and with perfect grammar and an under current of condescension.”

“She leaned forward and gave the man she was with a peck on the cheek, an incidental comma nestling up to a bold exclamation mark.”

“Art had tried to call his new pet Maggie, as instructed by Lydia, but her surname lurked in the ensuing pause like toxic waste.” (pet’s full name was Margaret Thatcher)

Thank you to Pamela Dorman Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on June 11th, 2024.

Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting by Clare Pooley (Fiction)

A cheerful, happy, just-what-I-needed book. A series of commutes on the Waterloo lines (London) leads to a burgeoning group of friends centered on one larger-than-life Iona Iverson — previously an “It Girl” alongside Bea, the love of her life. Iona is a popular “magazine therapist” (not an Agony Aunt!) plying her trade at a women’s magazine, but her clueless boss is pushing her towards the door due to her advanced age (57). Meanwhile, her unofficial and unpaid break-all-the-norms-of-commuting business is thriving.

Watching the group coalesce, each facing his/her own problems (a teenage girl afraid to show her face at school, a successful banker rapidly losing his money, a husband so dull his wife can’t stand him, and a male nurse without the confidence to approach the bookworm with an overbearing boyfriend) is funny, poignant, and uplifting. Big kudos to the author for actually bringing out the assumptions we make about people we don’t know and showing how wrong we can be. Rather than taking the easy way out and subscribing to the always popular white male bashing, she lets the person who appears to be the “smart but sexist Manspreader,” turn out to be a pretty decent guy (see one of the quotes below). Kudos!

Some fun quotes:
“Sanjay wound the tape back in his head, re-examining it from a different angle. Perhaps Piers hadn’t actually been flaunting anything. Perhaps that was just what he’d wanted to see. Was he just as guilty of stereotyping as everyone else? The thought lodged in his brain like a festering splinter.”

“…peering at him through narrowed eyes, giving him the impression of being scanned by a supermarket checkout machine before being declared an unexpected item in the bagging area.”

“He was like an electrical appliance on standby — still plugged in, but not functioning — and she had no idea where to find the remote control.”

“Emmie, why on earth did you decide to go into advertising if you have such an inflexible conscience?”

“Shakespeare, she’d discovered, never used four words when twenty-six would do. He might be good at the whole play thing, but he’d be useless at writing the emergency evacuation instructions for an airline.”

Thank you to Penguin Group Viking, Pamela Dorman Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on June 7th, 2022.