Myra Lipinski is one lonely old soul. Well, not that old. She's only 51. But she's been lonely so long that she knows no other way. She trained as a nurse "because I knew it would be a way for people to love me." Still, no dice. Now a self-anointed spinster it's just her and her dog, Frank. And also her patients, an eccentric bunch whom she home visits throughout the week.
But then, her dinner-for-one existence is rattled when an old school crush appears as her patient. Chip Reardon was her high-school dreamboat; way out of her ugly-duckling league. But he's not so dreamy now – he's dying of cancer. The pair soon strike up a friendship based on their mutual loneliness, and romance buds. For the first time in Myra's life, she finds herself in a loving relationship, albeit with a man who's days are numbered.
And from this comes a life-affirming realisation: that her loneliness wasn't fate at all. It was choice. We're born alone and then we die, and what gets us through all the successes and failures in between, ultimately, is connection. Connection to oneself and to others.
A middle-aged women whose marriage is in tatters forms an unlikely friendship with an old lady in a nursing home, in this classic of queer literature that wraps you into its world like a hug.
Evelyn Couch is a woman adrift. But when she meets Cleo Threadgood in an Alabama nursing home, the 80-year-old's stories about her life in a nowhereville town breathe life into her exhausted soul.
It is a delightful tale of family, aging, lesbianism, and the brutalising effects of racism in Deep South America, at the heart of which is a gorgeous story about the love affair between Ruth and Igdie, owners of The Whistle Stop Cafe.
Too much happens to do the story true justice here, but – in essence – it is a ballad of life in small-town America that Harper Lee called "a richly comic, poignant narrative". Its message: for all life's sticks, stones and broken bones, friendship is the word that soothes us.
“No one actually likes to admit they're old,” writes Nora Ephron . “The most they will cop to is that they're older. Or oldish.” Exactly. “In fact,” she later writes, “looking back, it seems to me that I was clueless until I was about fifty years old.”
Ephron's prose verges on poetry, her ideas explode into philosophy. So just sit back, empty your mind, and bathe in these reflections on growing older by the Queen of Growing Older.
This is the only non-novel on this list. But the final collection of essays that Nora Ephron wrote before she died defies genre, such is her mastery of language and self-expression, and is worthy of any literary list about aging.
With almost every sentence she writes, Ephron somehow manages to distil joy into its purest essence. All in, this delectably wry, dry and spit-out-your-tea funny collection of essays by the mind behind When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle is a love letter to getting older, gracefully or not.
'If you retire from love... then you retire from life'
Here is a deep, vulnerable and shudderingly honest meditation on what it means to be alone, post-divorce. J is a middle-aged divorcee tucked away in a sun-bleached Miami apartment where she spends her days translating sex stories by Ovid into English. She has an ageing mother, an incontinent cat, and a past punctured by romantic disasters. Now, she's beginning to contemplate giving up on sex and love all together.
Through J, Alison evokes beautifully the interior life of a single woman of a certain age who – for many reasons, both personal and societal – feels invisible to the outside world. But in this story – awash with humour, irony and no shortage of watery symbolism – there is always hope. As one friendly neighbour tells her, “if you retire from love... then you retire from life.” It's up to J to choose her path.
“Laying her brooch on the table, she had a sudden spasm, as if, while she mused, the icy claws had had the chance to fix in her. She was not old yet. She had just broken into her 52nd year. Months and months of it were still untouched. June, July, August! Each still remained almost whole, and, as if to catch the falling drop, Clarissa (crossing to the dressing-table) plunged into the very heart of the moment.”
That's Clarissa. We all know Clarissa. Dalloway by name, dallier by nature. She's a charmer, a dreamer, a flâneuse and a friend. A friend, that is, to all but herself.
Told across a single day, as she plans the party of her Tory politician husband, we are carried into her complex psyche as she strives to be “the perfect hostess” - to her servants, her daughter, her husband and her rejected suitor of years past. And yet, she is sinking into an existential funk.
Here is one of the greatest novels ever written about aging and change, about looking back on your life and seeing the multiple ways your life could have gone, without necessarily ruing any of it. Through Clarissa, we get a glimpse into the complexity of life and the way that small decisions can have big, unknowable consequences, both pretty and ugly. And from that sprouts an unforgettable ode to memory, dignity, survival and joy.
“I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.” So says the ageing heroine in Colette's scandalously sexy novel about an affair between a once-famous beauty and a playboy half her age.
Léa de Lonval was one of the most beautiful courtesans in Paris. But time has finally got its claws into her, and she's facing the end of her sexual career. Not only that, but her six-year love affair with the selfish young ladies' man Fred Peloux – aka Chéri – hits the rocks when he resolves to marry a woman of his own age. But what neither expects is how deep their connection flows, and how hard it can be to let go.
This, in brief, is a delicious tale of repression, scandal, sex and desire that rattled 1920s Paris by the bed boards, not least because it was one of the first novels of its kind to celebrate female sexuality in middle age.
And, in a society that still tries to shame women for growing old, Chéri 's message feels as pertinent now as it was shocking in 1920. Sex, as Colette doesn't quite say directly, does not end at 50. If anything, that's when it should improve.
Charles Arrowby is an aging curmudgeon. Before we meet him, he was an irascible, pompous theatre director who's lived “a life of egoism”. Tired of that life, he gives it all up to "become a hermit: put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good."
So off he trots to a creaky, wind-battered cottage on a rocky coastline to do just that. But soon, a string of blasts from the past pop up from London, and leave when they realise he's the same old bastard he's always been. Then, by pure coincidence, he bumps into his childhood sweetheart, now married, and he resolves to win her back.
The point: nothing can tame his ravenous soul. So he folds into a life of solitude, swimming in the sea, eating terrible food, and writing his memoirs. Alone. Ultimately, rather than a blueprint of how to be in middle age, Arrowby is an example of how not to be.
The final instalment of Jonathan Coe’s sweeping trilogy continues the multi-generational tale of the British families he introduced in The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle – now against the backdrop of Brexit referendum-era Britain.
Not just a clever, incisive interrogation of contemporary British identity (though it is, undoubtedly, that), Middle England is also a meditation on family relationships, and the ways that politics, class and identity come to bear on them over timespans short and long.
It’s a mature, eye-opening novel that asks big questions about the beliefs we too often let calcify over time.
Most of these books offer some sort of wisdom about enjoying your 50s. About taking middle-age by the horns and flipping the finger at time. Joseph Heller's story of a man ground into the mud by life has none of that. In fact, it's so punishingly bleak it might be better seen, in the context of this list, as a literary crash kit to jumpstart any fading joy for life, rather than inspire it.
It's so depressing, in fact, Kurt Vonnegut, in his now famous review in The New York Times, once asked : "Is this book any good? Yes. It is splendidly put together and hypnotic to read... one of the unhappiest books ever written.”
On paper Bob Slocum has it all. He's a white, privileged and reasonably successful ad-man; a war vet with a beautiful wife and three lovely children. And yet, he's also a serial philanderer, a closeted boozer, wants a divorce and to quit his job. He doesn't know why he's like this, only that, “Something must have happened to me sometime.” But rather than pulling his finger out, he spends his days wondering why bad things happen to good people... until, one day, something bad actually happens.
As you'd expect from the author of Catch-22, it is funny, astute and, as the LA Review of Books put it, "one of the most pleasurable, engrossing, and in retrospect moving American novels ever written.”
Death in Venice is one of the great classics of European literature, a compassionate tale of the death of youth... with a valuable lesson to boot. Gustav von Aschenbach is a successful writer in his 50s with a terrible case of writer's block. So he travels to Venice in search of spiritual release.
But when he gets there, he doesn't find inspiration in the beauty of the city, rather in the crushing beauty of a 14-year-old boy. He never speaks to the boy, let alone touches him, rather he observes him from a creepy distance – falling deeper in love as each day goes by. He stalks him about, and watches him on the beach, and from there he descends into full-blown obsession. He even visits a barber to dye his hair and rouge his face to give him a younger look.
This is not a story that can, in any way, end well for Gustav. If there is a moral in this tragic tale of mortality, infatuation and forbidden desire, it is that Gustav's obsession with the boy is really a reflection of his obsession with his own loss of youth.
The novel that won South African writer J M Coetzee both the Booker Prize in 1999 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 has seemed more relevant than ever in recent years . Following the professional and personal decline of David Lurie, an aging English professor in Cape Town who has an affair with a younger student, it explores exactly the kind of abuse of power which typfied stories that emerged from the #MeToo movement.
The other great theme of this masterful novel is racial tension and the legacy of apartheid in South Africa. But for the purposes of this list we might focus on what Disgrace has to tell us about middle age, and the pitfalls it presents. Lurie fits almost perfectly into a stereotype that has gained real momentum in recent years – partially fuelled by grumpy exchanges on Twitter – that of the man of advancing years whose ears are closed to anyone's tastes or opinions other than his own. Throughout the novel, Lurie variously 'mansplains' Mozart, Byron and how his daughter should respond to being sexually assualted. If the trick of growing old is to do so gracefully, David Lurie is perhaps a cautionary tale about doing the opposite.
Much of John Updike's work has been unfavourably reassessed in recent times: to put it mildly, his sexual politics have not aged well. Nevertheless, few would contend that when he was good, Updike was sensational. This installement in his most famous series, following the one-time high school basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, won him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1982 and holds up as well as any of his famously prolific output.
In Rabbit is Rich we join Angstrom in 1979 at the peak of his professional game managing a Toyota dealership. He's financially secure for the first time in his life, his turblent marriage to Janice is relatively stable and his son Nelson is in college. In other words, everything is perfectly primed to go wrong.
The Rabbit series definitely got more interesting as its hero grew up – the next in the series, Rabbit at Rest , won Updike his second Pulitzer – and Rich is full of the soaring and expansive prose style that marked his genius. Angstrom is a fine companion through the trials and tribulations of late life, whether it's family, work, or (of course) sex.
Image at top: Stuart Simpson / Penguin
