Food tastes wonderful when we’re ravenous, sleep is delicious when we’re exhausted, and water is profoundly satisfying when we’re really thirsty. Deprivation in advance always heightens pleasure in the present.
So it is with vindication. Vindication gets its sweetness from the years people have disparaged or ignored your idea or your subject—only to recognize that you may be right and your subject is of interest, after all.
My latest novel, Cybill Unbound, is about the sexual adventures of a woman middle-aged and older. To assess a book’s commercial potential, agents and publishers want to know the “similars”: other books with similar subjects published in the last five years. I was at a loss. Very little fiction is written about the love-lives of women of forty, fifty, and sixty, and I knew of no 21st century books featuring an older woman who has love affairs.
A writer likes to tread where few have gone before, but the novelty of my subject (and my hope to weave a new thread into the tapestry of fiction), proved a commercial and literary liability. I knew of no “similars,” let alone successful ones. Perhaps my subject was considered distasteful. A woman of fifty and sixty falling passionately in love and having glorious affairs? Perish the thought!
Yet I knew it could happen. One of my aunts was widowed after forty-five years of a good-enough marriage. Then, at age 78, she met the love of her life who thrilled her more than anyone she’d ever met. (Yes, the sex was great.) But few novels take the passions of the old as their subject matter. Even middle-aged women are rarely depicted as sexual creatures.
It is my conviction that all people think about sex a great deal, whether or not they are getting it, and that many people are getting it, as they always have, in unconventional ways.
Shortly before my book was published, I was pleased by the series “And Just Like That,” a reboot of “Sex and the City,” with all the characters twenty years older than in the original series. “And Just Like That” was a show about the love lives of fifty- and sixty-year-old women, so I thought that the climate might be right for my bold Cybill. But there was little prepublication interest. The subject still carried stigma.
In October, 2022, Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in literature. Ernaux is a French writer of autofiction, and one of her best-known books is Getting Lost. In the form of a diary, it recounts the obsessive affair of a French woman in her forties with a diplomat in his thirties. I wish it was a better book. It’s anguished and repetitive and formless, and she offers no new insights on obsession. There’s a lot of sex, but the only original detail is when the narrator loses her contact lens only to find it on her lover’s penis. It’s hard to imagine Getting Lost getting lauded or even published in America today. Perhaps Erneaux simply knew the right people (she mentions having lunch with Mitterand). And, of course, the French (and the Nobel committee) have different standards than ours. Although I did not admire Getting Lost, I was still pleased that Ernaux’s body of work had been honored. It seemed a good sign.
But the biggest literary validation that a woman of middle age can have sexual desires and sexual agency is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s posthumous novel, Until August, published just three weeks ago, on March 6th of this year. His heroine, Ana Magdalena Bach, is 46 and happily married to a handsome and successful orchestra conductor. Yet on successive yearly visits to the island where her mother is buried, she takes a lover for just one night. She is convinced that her mother would approve. Before her first adventure, “She felt mischievous, joyful, capable of anything.” (From Cybill Unbound: “She felt reckless, feckless, gorgeous. Here she was, a woman in her prime, in a strange city, with a new man.”)
With her beautiful golden eyes, Ana stares at a handsome man, compelling him to ask her for a drink. They drink and talk and soon she says, “Shall we go up?” They make love again and again, and all is well until Ana wakes up alone and sees that her lover has left her a twenty-dollar bill, as if she were a cheap prostitute.
Ana is punished for her pleasure—yet she doesn’t let this daunt her. (Cybill, too, gets punished but continues carrying on.) The next year brings Ana another lover, a younger man who makes love so athletically that she needs three days of sitz baths to recover. The third year she encounters an old male friend who has always desired her, but she flees from his advances. She is so desperate not to waste her annual adventure that she contemplates flagging down some random car in the street. The fourth year, when she is 50, she takes up with yet another man.
Throughout all this, Ana enjoys a happy marriage. “At least five of her friends had conducted furtive love affairs for as long as they’d had the energy and had maintained stable marriages at the same time.”
The first theme of my book is that older people can experience exquisite passion; the second theme is that exclusivity isn’t always necessary for a happy, stable union.
That one of the greatest writers of all time wrote his last book about these subjects is a huge vindication to me as a writer. Cybill Unbound may not exactly have “similars,” but two Nobel prize winners have written about its themes.
Gosh yes! I forgot all about that daring book! Something of a “similar,” true enough.
Glad the sons pushed on and got the novel published even though it was against his wishes. As to whether it measures up to his previous work, we’ll let the critics and readers decide.