How to Age Disgracefully
How to Age Disgracefully
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Clare Pooley on How to Age Disgracefully
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Anger at a recurring fictional shorthandPooley turned 55 while working on the novel’s early ideas, and the number landed with a specific force: she felt no different from her twenties, yet the culture had already begun to write her off. That gap between inner experience and external perception was the first match struck.
I was fed up with the way that in film, TV, and novels, the older generation are so often depicted as people who are hopeless with technology, at sea in the modern world, a bit sad and lonely, and they’re generally saved by the younger generation. I thought actually, I want to see older characters who are bossing it, who are using the wisdom that they’ve accumulated and are actually teaching the younger generation how to navigate the world rather than vice versa.
Two real-world news items gave the fictional premise its shape. Pooley had been reading about Dutch care centres that house elderly residents and nursery children in the same building, and she had followed the Hatton Garden heist, a major London jewellery robbery whose perpetrators, when finally caught, all turned out to be in their seventies. Those two stories collided into a single question about what older people, given the right circumstances, might actually get away with.
I think when you get past about the age of fifty, particularly as a woman, you do start feeling like you’re a bit invisible. And that makes me really cross, but it suddenly struck me that there are real advantages to invisibility, because you can sort of sneak under the radar.
That paradox, irritant turned plot mechanism, is what the character Daphne exploits across the novel. The invisibility that the culture imposes becomes the very condition that makes the crimes possible.
Pooley’s fiction has always carried the emotional function her memoir began. She quit drinking in 2015, wrote about it anonymously, and has described the act of writing as something she reaches for when she needs to work a feeling through rather than simply report it.
I started writing as therapy, as a way to deal with addiction, and to an extent I still do. I use writing to explore the things that make me angry (like ageism, homophobia, sexism), things that we struggle with (addiction, loneliness, feelings of inadequacy) and, ultimately, the things that make me feel better (love, community, kindness).
How she wrote it
A prologue first, the crimes discovered laterThe novel did not begin with a plan. Before Pooley knew what her characters had actually done, she had a single image: a minibus of elderly people and small children pulled over by police, every senior passenger certain the officer is there for them. She started writing toward that image without knowing what secrets would eventually surface.
I generally start by asking not what they’re good at and what their great strengths are. I start by asking what their fatal flaw is — what does this person struggle with? What are they finding difficult? What do they most want to change about themselves? And then I layer all their other characteristics around that. [paraphrased from audio]
One character required Pooley to work well outside her own experience. Ziggy, an 18-year-old single father trying to sit his A-levels while navigating a gang-controlled council estate, shares almost no biographical common ground with her. She read about gang culture and watched relevant documentaries, then hired a sensitivity reader to review those sections specifically before submission.
I have to live with this imaginary world in my head for two years and so I wanted to have a dog in it. I like my worlds to have dogs.
The dog, an elderly orphaned animal named Maggie Thatcher and shared among three characters who cannot agree on her diet or her furniture rights, functions as a character-revealing device: the different ways each person cares for her says more about them than most of the scenes they appear in alone.
Dialogue was the element of fiction Pooley found hardest when she first moved from memoir to novels. Early drafts ran for pages without any character speaking. The shift came only after she had spent enough time with each character to hear a distinct voice clearly in her head, at which point she would return to the dialogue and rewrite it from scratch.
I think How to Age Disgracefully is the most laugh-out-loud funny book I’ve written.
That assessment sits alongside a disciplined daily structure. She wakes around 5am and uses the half-waking state to visualize the next scene before real life arrives. About four hours of new writing follow each morning; she never touches new material in the afternoon. A first draft takes roughly three months, which she treats as a rough pencil sketch. Four months of solo editing follow, then another six months working with her editors in London and New York.
The personal thread
The woman she wants to be at seventyDaphne, the novel’s most formidable character, carries a walking stick not as an aid but as a weapon. She practices yoga and Pilates, and has been known to take dark alleyways specifically hoping someone will try to mug her. Pooley has been clear that this portrait is less a description of someone she knew than a specification of someone she intends to become.
She’s modelled after the sort of woman I want to be when I’m 70. She isn’t modelled after any one particular person, but she’s modelled after an amalgamation of characteristics that I found aspirational.
The novel gives its characters buried secrets that still have legal consequences, and Pooley has acknowledged that the premise resonates partly because the distance between her characters and herself is shorter than it might appear.
Don’t we all have secrets in our past? I’m not sure I have any secrets that would involve the police, but I certainly have stuff I wouldn’t want everyone to know. [paraphrased from audio]
On what the book is wrestling with
From the frying pan of sexism into the fire of ageismPooley chose Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ as the novel’s epigraph, and the signal it sends before the first chapter opens is deliberate: the book intends to argue, not to console. The argument targets a double diminishment that Daphne names directly in her own dialogue.
I was fed up with the way that in film, TV, and novels, the older generation are so often depicted as people who are hopeless with technology, at sea in the modern world, a bit sad and lonely, and they’re generally saved by the younger generation. I thought actually, I want to see older characters who are bossing it, who are using the wisdom that they’ve accumulated and are actually teaching the younger generation how to navigate the world rather than vice versa.
Pity, Pooley decided early, was the wrong emotional register entirely for what she wanted readers to feel. Older characters in fiction are routinely placed in positions where sympathy shades into condescension, and she set out to make that response structurally impossible by writing characters who act rather than endure.
With older characters in novels, you are encouraged to feel pity for them, and I didn’t want anyone to pity my characters. They’re often in quite precarious situations, and they’re not always the nicest people, but they’ve all got agency.
The community centre where the novel’s seniors and young people share a building is not just a setting. Across all her fiction, Pooley has described the same structural ambition: gathering mismatched people in a shared space and letting the friction between them produce something none of them could have reached alone. In this novel, that shared space is made literal by the Dutch model she read about.
I wanted to explore how even the most unlikable people in the right circumstances can be magnificent. And by the end, I think everybody is rooting for Daphne and she’s great, but it’s not where she starts off.
What she wants us to sit with
Agency, not pity, as the final noteDaphne begins the novel with no friends, a low opinion of most people around her, and a fairly settled belief in her own superiority. Pooley designed the arc from that starting point deliberately, because the distance the character has to travel is the novel’s actual argument about what people are capable of.
I wanted to explore how even the most unlikable people in the right circumstances can be magnificent. And by the end, I think everybody is rooting for Daphne and she’s great, but it’s not where she starts off.
The novel’s comedy is not decorative. Pooley’s earlier book The Sober Diaries used humour to make material about addiction and shame bearable, and she carried the same method into fiction: the laugh earns the reader’s trust before the harder thing arrives. What she wants that trust to carry, by the final pages, is a specific argument about what women past fifty are owed.
With older characters in novels, you are encouraged to feel pity for them, and I didn’t want anyone to pity my characters. They’re often in quite precarious situations, and they’re not always the nicest people, but they’ve all got agency.
Agency is the word she keeps returning to. Daphne’s walking stick as weapon, her deliberate route through dark alleyways, the crimes in the characters’ pasts: all of it is constructed so that readers cannot settle into the comfortable sadness the genre usually offers. The book insists, from epigraph to last page, that the appropriate response to ageing is not acceptance but refusal.