Forever 51 The Menopausal Vampire I ran across the new vampire novel Forever 51 The Menopausal Vampire in a list of newly published books online. I’ve now had hot flashes for a quarter of a century, so of course I was intrigued by the premise of a vampire in eternal menopause. What would a menopausal woman with superpowers be like? And why aren’t we all writing about her? I was even more intrigued when I read
Dare to Dream Madam Vice President We live in history every day, and some days that truth is crystal clear. As I write this it has just been announced that Kamala Devi Harris, a 56-year-old woman of African American and Indian American ancestry, is Vice President-Elect of the United States. She will be the first woman, the first African American, and the first person of Southeast Asian descent to hold that office. I cannot think
And Now the Days of Writerly Excess When October has come and gone, when your costume is back in the box and your Jack O’Lantern has grinned its last grin, it’s time for that annual festival of writerly excess, National Novel Writing Month. If you have ever struggled with your Inner Critic, if she insists that you either formulate the perfect sentence or forget this ridiculous notion of being a writer, give your Critic
A Week of Nobel Queens What a week for older women! Poet Louise Gluck, 77, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” Gluck is a professor at Yale who previously won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her lifetime of work includes twelve volumes of poetry and several collections of essays on poetry. One of her best known works is
Who Says Erotica is Porn? I got into a minor spat with a romance writer one day. She was talking online about how much writing romance means to her as an older woman, which I totally understand. Just like writing erotica, writing romance for older women has that wonderful ability to bring our stories to life, for ourselves and others, and to push back on the nexus of ageism and sexism that plagues us all—especially
Ubuntu – I Am Because We Are After six months of pandemic, it’s clear that this strange time exacerbates fear and brings out the human tendency to distance ourselves, to label one another as “Other”. It is easy to see when a group I belong to is labeled Other. When the health risks to older people are minimized, as in, “The deaths of older people don’t count because they would have died soon anyway.” Or
