HALLIE EPHRON: Starting with my first standalone, I've reveled in creating older (much older) female characters who defy stereotype. There's Mrs. Bindel in NEVER TELL A LIE; in CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR there's an elderly woman who turns out to be a criminal. Good or bad, they're sharp and insightful and, I hope, veering in the opposite direction of caricature.
So I feel as if I've met a soul sister in Sharon L. Dean whose new book, SIX OLD WOMEN AND OTHER STORIES, is peopled by genuinely old and genuinely realistic women.
Today I'm happy to welcome Sharon to Jungle Red and eager to share what she has to say about the characters that inspire her writing.
SHARON L. DEAN: Emma Donoghue wrote ROOM from the point of view of a five-year-old boy imprisoned with his mother for his entire life in a single room. William Faulkner wrote a masterful section of THE SOUND AND THE FURY from the point of view of a thirty-three-year-old man with the mind of a three-year-old. In NEVER LET ME GO, Kazuo Ishiguro found the voice of a young woman looking back on the life she’d lived as a clone, prepared now to donate her organs and die.
Different ages; in two cases different genders from the authors. I’m awed at their skill and the power of their imaginations.
Unlike them, I’m trapped by age and gender. When I was teaching at a small university, I might have used the point of view of a student, but when I began writing my first mystery series, I created Susan Warner, a retired English professor. I placed her in environments I know: on a bike ride along Mississippi’s Natchez Trace; at an academic conference on The Isles of Shoals; in a small town modeled on the one where I lived.
For the younger Deborah Strong, the protagonist of my second mystery series, I looked through my daughter’s high school yearbook and found a photo of a teenager who gave me the image for Deborah. I opened The Barn with Deborah as a teenager, then aged her as I moved her into familiar worlds: a library like the one where I had my first job; a college campus based on the university I attended; a cove in Maine where I gathered with friends from my university days.
Deborah is a generic adult age, living in environments familiar to me.
Now I find myself moving from generic to geriatric. My collection SIX OLD WOMEN AND OTHER STORIES includes six ninety-three-year-olds living together on an island in Lake Winnipesaukee, an old woman looking back at an event that happened when she was a teenager at a resort on Newfound Lake, and an old man and an old woman living as recluses in a small New Hampshire town.
In these stories, I imagined characters older than I am. They have the bodies of the aged: dowager’s humps, jiggly arms, veined legs, faces invaded by wrinkles, wiry hair, thick waists hidden by house dresses or lounge suits. A dermatologist once called my moles “weeds in the garden of life.” I wanted to call them “perennial flowers.”
My elderly characters are like those flowers. Even at ninety, they bloom. They’ve lived and they continue to live, at least some of them do.
I wonder if I’m haunted––by memories of my grandmother who spent her last days in a care facility where nurses tied back her hair with pink yarn; my eighty-pound mother, her back bent from scoliosis; the old man in my neighborhood, his body an L-shape. Whatever it is, something has been prompting me to write what has been called “geezer lit.”
Perhaps I’m haunted by the future as I hope that my last exit will be as adventurous as the ones I create for my characters.
Do you have any preference for the age of the characters you create or the ones you like to read about?
ABOUT SIX OLD WOMAN AND OTHER STORIES
Six old women living on an isolated island in Lake Winnipesaukee, teenagers vacationing on Newfound Lake in 1959, paragliders and skiers on Cannon Mountain, an old woman in a house covered in gypsy moths, a man living off the grid in a shack he built himself. The characters in these stories all keep secrets. They are as tough and rugged as New Hampshire’s iconic Old Man in the Mountain. And like The Old Man who fell in 2003, their pasts survive only in memory. Sometimes that’s a good thing.
SHARON L. DEAN Sharon L. Dean grew up in Massachusetts where she was immersed in the literature of New England. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of New Hampshire, a state she lived and taught in before moving to Oregon. Although she has given up writing scholarly books that require footnotes, she incorporates much of her academic research as background in her mysteries. She is the author of three Susan Warner mysteries and of a literary novel titled Leaving Freedom. Her Deborah Strong mysteries include The Barn, The Wicked Bible, and Calderwood Cove. Dean continues to write about New England while she is discovering the beauty of the West.
