Second acts

The historian Amanda Foreman wrote recently that she used not to believe in the midlife crisis until, as she was approaching her 50th birthday, her family complained that she had ‘become miserable to be around’. She quoted one of F Scott Fitzgerald’s most memorable lines: ‘There are no second acts in American lives.’ But, as she discovered, he actually wrote the reverse in a 1935 essay My Lost City, about his relationship with New York: ‘I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York’s boom days.’ Fortunately, Foreman’s gloom lifted once her birthday came around.

There are lots of examples of authors who began writing only in their forties, fifties, sixties and seventies: their second acts. The bestselling author Mary Wesley, for example, turned to writing (children’s books) in her late sixties when she was left a widow and needed to earn some money; she published her first adult novel when she was 71 and continued writing into her eighties. Penelope Fitzgerald launched her literary career at the age of 58, with a biography of Edward Burne-jones; she later turned to fiction and won the Booker prize for Offshore in her early sixties. Richard Adams was 52 when his first book, Watership Down, was published; Raymond Chandler was also in his fifties when Philip Marlowe was introduced. Frank Mccourt did not become a published author until the age of 66 with his bestselling autobiography, Angela’s Ashes (winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1997).

If you turn the pages inside, you will find books by men and women of a ‘certain age’ (I wouldn’t dream of being age-specific): Antonia Fraser, Simon Winchester, Edmund White…there are also books by youngies (at least they are in my view): Stig Abell, Caitlin Moran, Henry Hitchings. So it’s never too late (or too early) to start writing: I hope you will be inspired by the books reviewed.