It’s a tough gig when you’re past your prime
by Elisabeth Hanscombe
By Guest Contributor, Varuna Alumna Elisabeth Hanscombe
Introduction by Diana Jenkins
I’m turning 43 in September, a fact that’s endlessly surprising to me. It’s also frustrating, because I sometimes feel I haven’t properly established myself professionally – at least not to my satisfaction. To have been unable to get so much as a short story published since I stopped faffing about is an ongoing agony to me. I feel so many things about it, including shame. And there’s no doubt my acute sense of failure is tied up in my age. This is how I berate myself:
I’m nearly 43! No one’s ‘discovered’ at 43! Jesus Christ! Look at all those Bright Young Things! Fuck them! I hate them! Oh no, I don’t. Not really. Good on them, I suppose. It’s just that once I thought that would be me. Me, me, meeeeeeeee! So fuck me for being so grandiose! Delusional! Stupid! Embarrassing! Aaaaargh! Who thinks that about themselves? What sane person looks at someone with a once- in-a-million publishing deal and honestly thinks, ‘That could be me someday…’? Fucking ridiculous! And the misplaced confidence is only as bad as the total and utter failure to convert. It didn’t happen? OF COURSE IT DIDN’T HAPPEN! It won’t ever be me. Not at 43.
See how this line of thought conveniently loops back to pin itself to my age rather than to my shortcomings as a writer? My age barks through me like an angry dog, forever whining and nipping at my heels.
So I understand precisely what this month’s Alumni Guest Contributor is talking about. I hope you enjoy Elisabeth’s piece – and please don’t forget that I am looking for current members of the Varuna Alumni Association to contribute to the Monthly Feature in addition to the Alumni Interviews and my features on the writing life. Please email me if you’re interested. Guest Contributors will be paid an honorarium. Meanwhile, please welcome Alumna Elisabeth Hanscombe to Alumni News HQ.
It’s a tough gig when you’re past your prime
By Guest Contributor, Varuna Alumna Elisabeth Hanscombe
Lately, I’ve been overcome by a feeling of being past it. I’m an emerging writer: plenty of short publications, but my first book is yet to see the light of day (though not for lack of trying). My writing – informed over the years through my reading, not only of the classics, but also more recently by contemporaries – begins to have an old-fashioned ring in my ear. Not quite Dickensian in style, but bordering on something that shows my age.
They used to say you could tell whether a woman had written a piece of prose, as against a man, and many a woman disguised her identity behind a man’s name in order to pass herself off as the ‘real’ thing. Women were – for a long time and still – deemed second-rate in the literary world. The industry still holds its patriarchal edge.
Lately I’ve wondered: is age a feature, too? Can you tell the age of a person from their writing? It’s easier to do so with memoir. We memoirists date ourselves the moment we set words on the page. We date ourselves as soon as we begin to describe our childhood homes.
I’ve read pieces where the person was a 10-year-old in the mid-70s. It’s easy to guess their age now. They’re on the cusp of disappearing. Whereas those of us born during the ‘50s, ‘60s and earlier are already flipping over the edge.
It’s the same with fashion. There’s an optimal time when yesterday’s fashions, at the height of their popularity only 5 years ago, are now passé, old hat, so embarrassingly out of date you might only wear them to a fancy dress party. Something from the 1930s or earlier becomes fashionable again in a retro sort of way. You wear it with pride. Those of us in between begin to give off an aura of too-old-to-be-fashionable, but not-old-enough-to-be-hip. And that’s before any of the publishing industry or people who promote writing have laid eyes on us.
As Lynne Kelly writes, the definition of emerging is, ‘to come forth into view or notice, as from concealment or obscurity’. Lynne tells me she’s hardly an emerging writer, given she’s about to launch her fourteenth book, but she’s still ‘obscure’.
‘None of my books have attracted broad attention,’ she writes, ‘and my name is not known beyond the small subcultures of people I have worked with. Every book was going to be the big one, the one where I emerged from obscurity, and none quite made it. At 63, I’m starting to feel that emergence better start soon or my concealment will be permanent.’
Things tend to go downhill fast, though not always. There are a few writers over the age of 60 who have a significant profile, even as they’re emerging, but none come to mind. We’ve grown old with others, like Helen Garner, now in her 70s. She exists as a fully emerged writer over many decades: young and hip in her formative years, and now sage and persuasive, but it’s not so easy when you take to writing later in life. By the time you’ve reached a publishable standard, you find you’re too old to be considered.
I asked a few Facebook friends about their experiences as emerging writers over 50. We are the ones who, more than half way through a century, live on the scary side.
When I was a schoolgirl, I remember thinking when I reached 60, I’d like to die. To live to 60 would be good enough. By then I would be past the best of my life and ready to go. I imagined myself frail and tired.
Now that I have reached this age and find I am not so frail and tired, I find I am far from ready to die.
The idea of ageing first hit me as an adolescent, when my skin erupted and my body lost its shape. In those days I wanted it to happen fast. I wanted to get beyond the awkwardness of pimples to the dignity of the women on the television screen who smoked cigarettes, their fingers poised in the air, the last one perched like an alluring question mark.
Such a gesture, while I sat curled up in a ball and watched television, checking underneath my fingernails for dirt I could never be rid of and then digging my fingers into the flesh of my thighs that seemed to have magnified in the space of a single school term.
It triggers such washes of jealousy, this business of being an ageing and emerging writer. Whenever the next young person wins an award of significance, I think back to when I was her age and paid scant attention to writing.
Why did I leave it so late? Too late to ponder now, but still the thought rankles.
I could not write then as I write now, and yet, there are these young women who stun me with their capacity and wisdom, despite their years. They must have started early.
I live and work in a world of women, every one of us dogged by an internal discussion that runs along the lines of, am I good enough? Am I too young, too old? Accustomed to being looked at and measured on where we fit in the beauty scales of another’s desire, it’s hard to allow for a conversation about those inner voices.
But I hear them all the time. In a conversation with my writing group the other evening, for instance, one woman reflected on her memories of growing up and her longing that one day someone would come along and hand her a pile of money with which she might buy herself a flash wardrobe. An adolescent fantasy she wanted to explore in her writing.
I, too, dreamed of someone coming along, but not so much to give me money for clothes as to recognise my talent for singing. He’d come round to the back garden where I pegged clothes to the line.
This person, a movie-making man, would recognise my singing from the front street as he walked by. He would ring on the doorbell and ask my mother for an introduction, or he would walk down the side driveway to approach me directly, my arms filled with washing.
“You have the voice of an angel,” he would say. “Come with me and I will make you famous. Such a voice should not be kept hidden.”
I glowed under the weight of his praise and the daydream went on and on until every last sock was pegged on the line. When the basket was empty I lifted it to my hip, looked longingly up the driveway for the man who would arrive only in fantasy, and took myself back to the television set, where I curled up in my chair and wished once again to get inside that television with all the glamorous people. I comforted myself with five slices of bread: three with golden syrup, and the rest with cocoa sugar.
Later, as a young woman starting out in my chosen career as a social worker, I still longed to be older. Only then would I be taken seriously. Now I am older and command a degree of authority in my work as a therapist, but I find myself less confident in my writing life, almost fearful to go out to literary events because I am too old.
Yet, let’s face it, writers’ festivals are filled to the rafters with women, and a few men, from my age demographic. We far outstrip the number of younger folks at such events.
So why the shame? Why the feeling I must hide my face and its wrinkles inside the pages of a book? Why hesitate to talk about myself as an emerging writer, when the word ‘emerging’, as the not-yet-old, Alexis Harley writes, ‘seems such a gentle word’ with ‘implications of butterflies unfurling from chrysalises, taking as long as it takes.’ Yet, as Alexis warns, ‘the word’s just a notch away from “emergency”, with all its connotations of urgency’?
For others, like Maris Morton, a writer who won the CalScribe prize for an unpublished manuscript while on the cusp of her 70s, her age was an advantage, insofar as journalists could include that detail in the pitch. An older woman, who not only writes well, but wins prizes.
In the end, most of us persevere for the love of writing. As Emma Ashmere, just 50 and with her first book out, tells me: ‘The word [emerging] feels a bit like being at a forward lunge/lean, a bit like trying to get out of a deep chair for hours on end.’ And so she goes on, ‘I’ll just keep on permanently emerging/learning or something.’
It’s possible. We old and emerging writers can continue to emerge, halfway out of our cocoons into the sunshine. Even though, as everyone knows, butterflies only live for a short while before their beautiful lives are snuffed out.
So let’s enjoy the sunshine, while we can. Just as, on a recent visit to the zoo with my grandson, we admired the wonders of a butterfly, even an ‘old’ one with a tattered wing.