DOWN GOES THE AGE BARRIER
Feisty elderly widow makes for compelling protagonist in writer’s debut novel
A Grand Old Time Judy Leigh HarperCollins
LONDON Judy Leigh was thrown by the question. Why had she chosen to write a book about an old woman?
“I didn’t see this one coming,” Leigh sighs. “And I guess I should have.” Interviewers seemed puzzled there could be any sales potential in a yarn about a 75-year-old widow who kicks over the traces, rejects the constraints imposed on the elderly by today’s society and continues to see life as a grand adventure.
“It confused me a lot to be asked that question so often,” Leigh says now. But then she started thinking about a literary culture in which the very idea of making an older protagonist the centrepiece of a novel seemed somehow beyond the pale. And that made her doubly proud of having written a book that does celebrate old age instead of relegating the elderly to the “scrap heap” of life.
A Grand Old Time may have confounded youth-obsessed trendsetters within the British media, but its fortunes are soaring.
“The reviews over here have been positive, which is really incredible,” Leigh says by phone from her home in Somerset. Readers have been embracing the novel and its intrepid heroine, Evie Gallagher, and her determination to inform the world that she’s not dead yet.
“One woman wrote that she gave it to her mom and now her mom has decided to go to Amsterdam for the weekend. To me, that’s one of the greatest responses I could have had — to start somebody off on their own journey.”
Leigh herself was embarking on a new journey when, in her 50s, she decided to try her hand at fiction. She had enjoyed a long and successful career teaching theatre. She had produced and directed plays. But when her own children reached university age, she decided to do something about her own lifelong passion for writing. In 2015, as she was completing her master’s degree in professional writing at Falmouth University, she started A Grand Old Time as a student project.
By her own admission, she’s a late-flowering novelist. She’s also not wasting any time. Three further books are ready for publication, including a novel about a woman who has lived several previous lives. And she’s 5,000 words into a fifth one.
At 57, Leigh is well into middle age and as determined as the 75-year-old heroine of her debut novel not to be marginalized. Her first novel reflects her growing concern about how the elderly are perceived in a wider society.
And if Evie Gallagher, the central figure of this now novel, can play some role as an agent of change, Leigh will be delighted. The book begins with the widowed Evie regretting her move into a Dublin retirement home, where she is starting to feel like something less than a complete human being. So one night, she walks out of Sheldon Lodge, never to return, and embarks on the first phase of her adventure by taking a ferry across the Irish Sea to Liverpool.
It’s there that she makes an even more momentous decision — to cross the English Channel to Brittany and then, at the age of 75, to buy a camper van and embark a journey of self-fulfilment and independence. “She finds a person she didn’t know she was,” Leigh says. And in the process, Evie falls in love again.
Leigh says that Evie’s arrival in her writer’s mind was similar to Joan of Arc hearing her voices.
“I could hear her talking. I had this sense of her wry humour, her pluckiness, her feistiness. By the end, she has validated the person she really is and is comfortable with that person. And even though at the end of the book things haven’t gone the way she wanted — she has moved forward and has things she values that she didn’t have before.”
Leigh was creating a character reflecting her own mother’s side of the family — “the Irish side where the women are feisty and strong and stand up for themselves and have a sense of humour. So the voice in my head was my mother and my mother’s relatives who had that strength.”