Clare Pooley, fed up with books about sad older characters, wrote her hilarious bestseller, ‘How to Age Disgracefully.’

Clare Pooley explains how she came up with her ensemble comedy about seniors, secrets — and toddlers! Tired of books and films where the only older people were “sort of side characters being rescued by a younger person, I thought, ‘Well, sod that!’ I want to see older people who are the kind of person I want to be, who are kicking ass and showing younger people how to do things.”

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Transcript for The Girlfriend Book Club’s Clare Pooley interview on “How to Age Disgracefully”
Filler words have been removed for clarity.

Shelley Emling: Welcome, everyone, to the Girlfriend Book Club’s monthly discussion. I’m Shelly Emily, the editor of The Girlfriend Newsletter. I’m also the moderator of the Girlfriend Book Club, and this month, more than 100,000 members chose to join. How to age disgracefully as their pick for March.

And I’m so glad they did because this book is so fun and filled with characters of all ages, doing all sorts of things, and it’s just an adventure. And I couldn’t put it down. I think I read it in two days. It’s just fabulous. And we’re so lucky to have Pooley with us. She’s the author of a memoir about her life called The Sober Diaries, and she’s written three novels, including the Authenticity Project, all our big hits. And so we’re so glad to have her here with us. Welcome, Claire.

Clare Pooley: Oh, it’s so great to be here. Thank you so much, and thank you to everybody who voted for my book. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am.

I joined The Girlfriend Facebook page, and I love it because I often think social media can be quite divisive and different. But there is something so lovely about groups of people talking about books. It’s still a wonderful place to hang out, so thank you.

They’re

Shelley Emling: united by their love of reading, and it’s a very safe space. It’s really fun and very supportive, so I love it. So first, I have to ask where you got the idea to do this book.

Clare Pooley: Oh, you know what? It was a combination of things. I guess the first thing is that I am, I’m now 55, and I don’t feel any different from the way I did when I was 25, and I don’t imagine that when I’m 75 I’ll feel any different either.

I was just getting fed up with reading books and seeing films where the only older characters were side characters. They were usually sad side characters, generally in a bit of a bad place, and they would be rescued by a younger person. And I thought, sort of, I actually want to see older people in.

Books that are like the kind of person I want to be, kicking ass and showing younger people how to do things properly. So I guess that was the first thing. And then a couple of other things coincided. One was that I kept reading about these centers, and they have a lot in the Netherlands where they combine senior care with nursery care, right?

And I thought. That would be an exciting space to put a novel in, where you’ve got these sorts of older people and toddlers forced to share the same space. And it would be interesting to see what sort of magic might happen in that instance.

The final thing was that I was listening to the radio, and there was a story about the hat and garden jewelry heist. The story is this: There was a big jewelry robbery a couple of decades ago, and it took them a long time to find the people who had committed this massive jewelry heist.

And the reason it took so long for them to find them because they were all in their seventies. And I thought, yay. How interesting. That sort of thing. Thieves were that much older, which got me thinking about what might happen if you put a group of badly behaved older people in this situation.

Yeah. So that’s where it came from.

Shelley Emling: Yeah. I was gonna ask you, how did you come up with the idea for the first scene with the bus and that policeman stopping the bus full of all these characters?

Clare Pooley: Oh yeah. The way I write, I don’t have the whole plot in my head when I start. I have the beginning, the end, a few key scenes, and the right.

That scene was, I think, the first one I imagined. And it came from reading and listening to this story about the Hatton jury heights because I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if you got this group of people, older adults and toddlers, young kids in a mini bus, one of those mini buses driving through London, the whole time with people on a day trip.

And the police stopped them, and everybody thought that they were the ones the police were looking for because they all had something in their past. And, don’t we all have secrets in our past? I’m not [00:04:00] sure I have any secrets involving the police, but I certainly have stuff I wouldn’t want everyone to know, so I thought that would be a great place to start. And when I started writing the book, I didn’t know what they’d all done. And I thought as I continued writing, it became clear what their pH felonies were. But at the beginning, I just knew they’d be confessing to something.

Shelley Emling: It drew everybody into the book quickly. So did you really always ask this question: Was there a character, a scene or a section that was particularly challenging to write? Was Daphne more challenging than Arch? Was there a part of it that was challenging to write?

Clare Pooley: I think Ziggy was the most challenging for me because of his. Upbringing is so different from mine. I had an elementary middle-class childhood, and Ziggy was brought up by a single mom who was doing her best and had to struggle to keep up with three different jobs.

Things are together; he lives on a rough council estate ruled by competing gangs. And he gets drawn into that. And I knew, I’ve read about gang culture. I’ve watched many programs about it, but it is not my world. Yeah. And I was keen to make sure I got it right.

I did a lot of research into how that world worked. Then, I found a sensitivity reader who knew a lot about gang culture to review everything and make sure that I hadn’t done anything incorrect or unauthentic.

So yeah, he was my hardest character, but. I really enjoyed writing him because I think it’s easy to look at people like that and think they are bad people. And Ziggy isn’t a bad person in any way, shape or form. He’s a great guy. Yeah. He’s just stuck in a situation that he, of not, of his own making, that he’s struggling to find his way out of.

And I thought it was important to. To see the humanity in characters like that.

Shelley Emling: I love the way you had older people helping and supporting younger people and vice versa. Soki helped Daphne with the internet and online dating, and she helped him by babysitting. So I really like that part of the novel.

Yes. Yeah, sorry. And you said you were in your fifties.

Clare Pooley: I enjoyed that too.

Shelley Emling: That’s very well written. You said you were in your fifties, so did you base or connect with Lydia, the character? Did that drop in your own life at all? At all?

Clare Pooley: Yeah. She’s the same life stage as I.

Her daughters have left home and gone to university, which I’m facing: the empty nest. Yeah. And I’m menopausal, Lydia, and dealing with that too. And I think it’s really easier at that age to feel a bit lost and like you don’t know quite and don’t feel as needed anymore, so I wanted to explore that. But in some ways, Lydia is absolutely not like me, so I’m lucky in that I have a really lovely husband.

So unlike hers, poor Lydia. And I’m a bit feistier than Lydia. At the beginning of the book, she’s a bit. Really, and she grows into herself. But many thanks to Daphne.

Shelley Emling: Daphne was great. Yeah. I think Daphne was my favorite character. Yeah, me too.

Clare Pooley: Me too. Yeah.

Shelley Emling: Can you cite any other books, TV series, or films that have showcased older adults in this way and from which you drew inspiration?

Clare Pooley: A lot. I know. Yeah. I loved the Marigold Hotel, where the book and film are set in India, which I thought was absolutely fabulous. And yeah. I, yeah, I can’t think of any others offhand, but there are, there are many, but not as many as there should be.

There should. Exactly.

Shelley Emling: No, I agree. I asked the book club members what they wanted me to ask you. And one of them said they were they loved the dog, Maggie Thatcher being in this book. And I think that there was a dog in your other book. Iona, I’ve, what was it? Iverson’s rules for commuting and the dog was named Lulu, I think. Yes. So if you’d like to bring a dog character in,

Clare Pooley: I always have a dog in my books, and my American editor, Pam Doman, is also a huge dog fan. I remember when she first gave me feedback on my very first novel, the Authenticity Project.

I remember her saying, This book needs more dog. And I agree. I think you can’t have too many dogs. But I think something is exciting about dogs in literature, I think, because. You can tell a lot about people by how they treat a dog. Yeah. And what I loved playing with, in how to age disgracefully, is how each character had a different name for the dog.

They had different rules for the dog. Daphne constantly gave her stake, and Liz was very strict about her having dried kibble. I thought it was a way of showing readers more about my characters, but in a slightly different way. So I have to tell you a quick story, though, about my dog in the authenticity project, because in the authenticity project, the dog was called Keith.

Okay? Keith was an old dog rescued by Julian, one of the main characters. Right at the end of the book, Keith has left for reasons I read into, so I don’t give you any spoilers, but Keith has left by himself, and I had—I can’t tell you how many emails and messages I had from people saying that they’d had.

Sleepless nights and were terribly worried about Keith. And was he okay? And what happened to him? It made me realize how much people care about fictional dogs, and I wrote back to everyone saying, Don’t worry, Keith is okay. And I told them what happened to Keith in the end and I had to, when they, we did a reprint of the book, I had to put a PS in the author’s note to explain what happened to Keith so that people didn’t get worried because I didn’t want to keep getting emails from distraught readers.

Shelley Emling: How long did it take you to write The Art of Aging Disgracefully, and what’s your writing process like?

Clare Pooley: Oh, I write the first draft generally very quickly because writing a first draft is almost imagining if you are doing a. In a landscape painting, you would do a rough sketch before you do anything else to give you an idea of scale, perspective, and all of that sort of stuff, composition, and that’s how I approach my first draft. So my first draft is just me trying to determine what this book is about. So I wrote the first draft in about three or four months. Okay. And then I spent about another four months editing it by myself, and then another four months editing it with my editors.

So the process from beginning to end takes about a year.

Shelley Emling: Okay.

Clare Pooley: Yeah.

Shelley Emling: Do you always set aside a certain number of hours each day to write?

Clare Pooley: I write early. I think authors tend to write either really early or really late. And I write really early, so I wake up.

Super early, like 5:30 in the morning, I start working out the next chapter I’m writing in my head while I’m still half asleep. So it feels like it’s almost a dream. I find that the liminal state is really creative, and I think it helps you think laterally. I think if you are. If you are wrestling with any problem or anything, thinking about it at that time of day gives you exciting solutions.

So I worked it out in my head, and then wrote for about three hours. Oh, okay. And then in the afternoon, I edit, but I don’t write anything new in the afternoon because my brain is by that stage, it’s not working how I need it to.

Shelley Emling: Your brain is like my brain.

Clare Pooley: Be the afternoon, it’s filled with to-do lists and scores and problems and all that.

You know what, first thing in the morning, it’s like a blank sheet of paper,

Shelley Emling: So I think everybody who read this new book of yours is now going to go back and read all of your other books. Oh, I understand. And I know that your memoir, The Sober Diaries, is quite personal, as is the author’s.

Authenticity project: Do you run these books or drafts by family members or anyone else before you take them to the editor, or no?

Clare Pooley: For The Sober Diaries, I made sure that everyone was happy with it before I published it because it’s nonfiction, right? And my family is in it.

My husband, my kids, and my parents are in it, and my friends are in it. And, I didn’t want to upset anyone, so I asked everyone whether they were happy with what I was saying and whether they wanted me to change their names and actually, amazingly. I think only one person asked me to change their name.

Oh, really? So yeah, I did. And with fiction, I get my eldest. I have three kids, and my eldest is now 21. And I always get her to read everything first. That’s nice. ‘Cause she is. Blunt enough to tell me the truth, and I won’t get angry with her. And unlike my husband, who slept on the sofa for two nights after I showed him a book draft.

Oh no. She’s also a good storyteller. She has a good sense of story and where things are working and where they’re not, so she always reads things first.

Shelley Emling: So the characters of Daphne, like I said, were my favorite characters and art. Did you draw? Were they based on anybody you know, or are they a composite of different characters that may be in your life?

Clare Pooley: I don’t think my characters are based on one person. ‘Cause apart from anything else, I think it would be cheating, but they are based on composites. So, actually, funny enough, my kids. Bought me a mug, which has written on it, Be careful or you’ll end up in my next novel.

That’s great. And it’s true because I’ll meet people and there’ll be something they say or do, and I’ll think, oh, I must remember that because that would be really good somewhere. And all of this stuff goes into a sort of melting pot. And then, it’s just things pop out randomly, and you think, oh yeah, that would be good for this character. When I’m writing a character, 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. So I think, okay, so Art, he was struggling with the fact that his career had never taken off. And because of stuff that had happened in his background, he was a thief, he’d picked up this terrible shoplifting habit and then.

From there, I think. Okay, how would somebody like that? What sort of [00:15:00] friends might they have? What they might, what they look like, what might, and everything. Everything comes from that. Yeah. Point.

Shelley Emling: So what authors or books have inspired you throughout your life? Are you reading anything great right now?

Clare Pooley: I’ll tell you about the two best books I’ve read recently; you’ve probably read them already. The first is The Wedding People.

Shelley Emling: I haven’t, but a lot of women have talked about that, how much they love that book. Yeah.

Clare Pooley: Oh, it’s great. It’s great. It is exactly my kind of book. I love it. I really enjoyed that. And then a book that. She is quite different from anything else that I’ve read recently. Is Margot’s Got Money Troubles? Have you read that one?

Shelley Emling: I haven’t read that one either. Wow. I have, I must.

Clare Pooley: That’s really interesting because it’s a single mom who, again, this happens right at the beginning, so it’s not a spoiler, but she’s a single mom who is trying to make ends meet by using, by running a business on OnlyFans.

And, I’d heard of OnlyFans, but. I hadn’t really thought about [00:16:00] what it would be like to be one of the women who make a living that way. And it is, it’s hilariously funny and very eye-opening. So yeah, I really enjoyed that too. But in terms of authors, I guess they have had an impact in the past.

And have you read the Tales of the City Series by Armistead Mopar?

Shelley Emling: I have not.

Clare Pooley: Oh, it’s fantastic. They’re set in San Francisco in the 1970s. And what I loved about those books, Knit, inspired my first novel. Therefore, I guess my subsequent novels are about a group of people who all end up living in the same apartment building in San Francisco, but they’re very different. They have other stories that all come together because they’re all in this city at this particular point in time. And I remember thinking that was such a great novel structure.

The idea of strangers coming together and how they might form an unlikely community, and change each other’s lives, has inspired my writing.

Shelley Emling: Great. My favorite was when we had the girlfriend book club pick The Lion Women of Tehran. Have you read that? Oh,

Clare Pooley: I wrote that but haven’t read it yet.

Is that good?

Shelley Emling: Excellent. And the author came on with me. She was amazing. It was a really great read. Very, I loved it. Loved it.

Clare Pooley: Okay, I’m putting that on my list. Thank you.

Shelley Emling: So did I hear they’re making How to Age Disgracefully into a film? Is that right or not?

Clare Pooley: Oh, I wish they were.

Shelley Emling: I can see it as a film. I really can.

Clare Pooley: I see it as a film. I see all my books as films because I talk about how I imagine the next chapter I’m writing. I run it forward in my head like a movie when I’m half asleep. So I see it very visually, and I would.

My big dream when I was younger was to write a novel, and then you do that and you think, okay, now what? Now what’s my big dream? And my big dream now is for one of my novels to be on the screen. I would so love to see that. So I’m keeping everything crossed. Okay.

But I would love for Helen Mirrin to play Daphne. That would be my, she would be

Shelley Emling: perfect in that role,

Clare Pooley: Wouldn’t she? She’s exactly the right age, too. Yeah.

Shelley Emling: So, what are you working on now, book-wise?

Clare Pooley: Oh, I’ve been struggling with the next one. I find the beginning of novels hard because.

Once I’ve got the right idea and I’ve written a few chapters, then I’m off, and it’s great. Now all my characters start improvising, but right at the beginning, when you are still struggling with finding that idea, I find it really hard.

So I started writing two books, which I then decided weren’t right. And I’m now on my third attempt at my fourth novel. I think it might be the one. Good. But it’s at a very early stage. But what I can tell you is it’s set in a bookshop, which, oh.

Yeah, which I’ve never before, and I think I’m having fun with it so far. So hopefully this will be the one. Fingers crossed.

Shelley Emling: So you said you always wanted to write a novel when you were young.

If you weren’t writing books, is there another career path you might have taken?

Or is this? Did you know you would be a writer since you were little?

Clare Pooley: Oh, I didn’t know I would be a writer because I didn’t think I would. Being good enough is not necessarily. But it was always a dream. And I guess in terms of what I would’ve done otherwise, I spent 20 years in advertising, which was great fun.

I did

Shelley Emling: Read that about you. Yes. Yeah, it was

Clare Pooley: great fun, at least at the beginning. I’m not sure. It was so much fun by the end. And I think. My other fantasy career was that I always liked being a barrister, so I like the idea of standing up in court in a wig and gown and pontificating.

Shelley Emling: I also read that you often write books outside of London in the countryside. Is that correct?

Clare Pooley: Yeah. I spend a lot of time in Cornwall down by the sea and love writing there. Or I go up to Scotland, I go I, it’s, I find that. If it helps to get away from your typical environment, because to start with, you don’t have as many distractions.

You don’t end up sitting there thinking, oh, I really should empty the dishwasher, or, I should do some, some dishes. DIY or household chores or whatever. And I think it just, again, it helps you to think about things in a slightly different way. So I guess London is excellent for inspiring.

And I love the theater. I love movies, and I love restaurants. I love watching all the people. But when it comes to actually writing, I quite like to get away into sort of, where there’s nobody and just so I have no excuse, but to sit there with

Shelley Emling: My laptop. So I just have two more questions. One is, were you surprised at the reaction to how to age disgracefully?

Was it more, people seem to just absolutely love it and rave about it, or did you find that you had more of a reaction, like maybe your memoir, the sober diaries? Just curious.

Clare Pooley: Oh. I’ve, I am, I love the fact that pretty much every day, I get an email from somebody saying how much they enjoyed how to age gracefully and how much it made them laugh.

And I’ve had some of the funniest emails from people in their seventies, eighties, or even nineties, saying how much they enjoyed it and telling me a bit about how they’re aging disgracefully, which is great for a new book. Yeah, I had this letter and nobody. I’ve never received an actual letter from my publishers.

I usually get messages via social media or email, and this lovely lady wrote a handwritten letter to my publishers, who then sent it to me. She said she was in her eighties and told me how much she loved the book, which was really lovely. [00:22:00] And she ended by saying, in the book Art and Daphne, sorry, art and William constantly play this game, the Best Way to Die. So it’s just their sort of black humor, and they’ll say, the best way to die is to be run over by a car or in a plane crash.

Shelley Emling: I know, I love that.

Clare Pooley: Or whatever. And anyway, this lady ended by saying p.

The best way to die is under a toy boy. PPS is another way to die laughing while under a toy. Boy,

Shelley Emling: That’s so cute. That’s so sweet. I love it.

Clare Pooley: I think it’s had. It hasn’t necessarily had more of a reaction than my other books, but it’s had a response. Yeah, a different type of person.

And yeah, I love that. And yeah, I think people relate to it in a, I think it prob, I think it’s probably had more people saying how much it’s made them laugh than anything else I’ve written. And yeah, I think that’s great. [00:23:00]

Shelley Emling: Finally, I always ask my girlfriend about female friendship, especially its importance as you grow older.

So I always ask, “What do you do for fun? “What do you like to do with your girlfriends when you’re not reading or writing?

Clare Pooley: Oh gosh. My girlfriends are so important to me. I have I, I still see my old school friends at least once every five or six months.

And, I was at school a long time ago, but we still meetup and go on holiday together from time to time, that sort of thing. Likewise, my university friends and I have girlfriends who go back a long way. And there’s something really special about that.

You can use shortcuts, and you find that even when you haven’t seen one of them for a really long time, you can pick up where you left off. And that’s amazing. And in terms of what I do, I often walk with dogs. Two or three times a week, I’ll meet a girlfriend with a dog and a coffee, and we’ll go for a long walk.

An hour, two hours, and we’ll chat. And I find that there’s something about walking that enables you to open up in a way you don’t sometimes when sitting right opposite somebody. So yeah, that’s my favorite thing. Walks with women and a dog. And a dog, ideally, although some of my friends come from my dog walks without a dog.

Just for fun. Yeah. So

Shelley Emling: I also have two dogs, and I love walking them.

Clare Pooley: Which dogs do you have?

Shelley Emling: Oh, they’re just mutts from the rescue center. Yeah. Oh,

Clare Pooley: excellent. In the book I’m writing at the moment, the dog is a rescue dog. I had a big one, like a part of the Irish Wolfhound.

Shelley Emling: Wow. You can’t wait for your next book. Again, if you haven’t read her new novel, How to Age Disgracefully, and I think probably everybody watching this has, please do read it if you haven’t already. So thank you so much, Claire, for joining us. I want to remind everybody in the book club to stay on the page because I’ll post some conversation starters about the book so you can share your ideas and opinions.

And also just a reminder that our book in April is the God of the Woods. And Liz Moore, the author, will join us on April 15 at 7:30 PM. So thank you so much. Goodnight everybody. Thanks, Claire, for joining us. I so

Clare Pooley: Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you, everybody, for listening. I appreciate it too.