Post-40 Bloomers: “Late” According to Whom?

This post was produced in partnership with Bloom, a literary site that features authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older.

1.
We are a storytelling species, we humans, circled around our archetypal fire, backs to the impenetrable dark and lurking beasts. Before there was fiction as we know it, there were metaphors and myths to help explain where we come from and where we go. Storytelling has always been an antidote to the fear of what we don’t know or understand.

Our litany of fears hasn’t changed much over the last 50,000 years or so. We fear death, illness, pain, infirmity. Now that we live into our 80s and 90s, we can add to that list the fear of losing our faculties.

On the upside, without this innate horror of death and decline there would be very little art, and surely not much literature. It’s human nature to want to defang the beast, but also to poke it — to see what our fears are made of. And people want stories — need them — more than ever, it seems. Popular storytelling programs like The Moth and This American Life, for example, reassure us that we’re in this together. We’re all going to die; let’s go from there.

There is a shadowy twin to that bit of reality: most of us will also find ourselves bearing witness to someone else’s final days — days that in fact often turn out to be weeks, months, years. Parents, partners, relatives, friends: someday you will watch a person you care about suffer. It’s not so much that last shovelful of dirt on the grave that should terrify us, but emptying all those bedpans.

2.
Eileen Tumulty, the central character in Matthew Thomas’s debut novel We Are Not Ourselves (Simon and Schuster), has no time for worrying about what she does or doesn’t fear. Born in 1941, to Irish immigrant parents in Queens, Eileen is a clear-eyed striver. Wary of the ways drink and habitual sorrow encumbered her own parents, and confident that she alone is responsible for the life she wants to lead, she concentrates on moving out and up. She works and saves, goes to nursing school, and refuses to succumb to the charms of the local boys, until a friend fixes her up with Ed Leary, a serious young man with a promising career in neuroscience. Within the year they’re engaged. They move from drab Woodside to Forest Hills — in 1967, a diverse and thriving neighborhood — and have a son, whom Eileen impulsively names Connell after a visiting friend leaves a copy of Evan S. Connell’s Mrs Bridge on the hospital nightstand: “[I]t sounded more like a last name than a first name, like one of those patrician monikers the doctors she worked with often bore, and she wanted to give the boy a head start on the concerns of life.”

Eileen understands how the American Dream works: You leave as little as possible to chance. You save your money, educate your children, and take every opportunity that presents itself. Ed, on the other hand, turns down a tenure-track job at NYU because he’d rather teach low- and middle-income students at Bronx Community College, and prefers to keep teaching rather than move up as assistant dean. He’s content in their Queens neighborhood, even as it becomes rougher around the edges, while she wants a home in Bronxville, an upscale Westchester suburb.

Ed keeps doing the work he loves, but Eileen eventually gets her house, overspending on a rundown fixer-upper. Around the time of their move, however, Ed begins to act erratically, lashing out at Connell for imagined infractions, mixing up his students’ grades, abandoning home repairs in frustration. Eileen does her best to help him, but eventually decorum and denial can’t compensate for Ed’s inability to function. She takes him for a neurological workup — even at the doctor’s office swinging between protecting the man she loves and desperate disbelief:
“Tell me something. Do you know who the current president is?”

If he wanted to insult him, this was a perfect way to do it. She almost wanted Ed to answer sarcastically or deliberately incorrectly, but she didn’t want the doctor to have the satisfaction of writing it down on that little pad of his.

Ed sat with it; maybe he was coming up with a witty riposte.

“I know it’s a Republican,” he said, “I know that.”

The diagnosis is early-onset Alzheimer’s; Ed is 51. And so the game changes for the Learys. The American Dream will only take you so far, Thomas proposes, underscoring the novel’s unmistakable subtext: this could be your story. It could be mine.

3.
A few days before Christmas 2006, my mother slipped on an icy step and hit her head. She had just finished giving an English lesson to a young Japanese couple; they saw her fall, called 911, and waited outside with her for the ambulance. She blacked out only briefly, and the damage was minimal: a small skull fracture with no cranial bleeding, some spinal trauma but nothing broken. She received immediate and excellent care, and her prognosis was good.

Mom was already what I thought of as ditzy — a little absentminded, sometimes silly, but nothing you wouldn’t expect from someone just short of her 79th birthday. Until a few of years before, she had been commuting into Manhattan daily, working as a bank president’s assistant, and, once she retired, she began teaching English at the local chapter of Berlitz. She read widely and critically, painted and drew, cooked adventurously, and loved going to galleries. But some bad convergence of side effects began to take its toll almost immediately after the accident. The head injury, the inactivity, and who knows what else, slowly shut her down.

Her deterioration was typical of all types of dementia: Periods of no change punctuated by small disasters that would reshuffle the deck, forcing us to scramble for solutions. There was no predictable pattern, except for my own near-miraculous capacity to be shocked and dismayed every single time. It wasn’t that I expected her to get better. I just didn’t imagine she’d get so much worse so quickly. It took me years before I could stop thinking, If she would just pay more attention…

Though there are countless books, websites, and support groups available, I’ve turned to friends and family — or rather, we’ve turned to each other. According to the 2014 Alzheimer’s Association Facts and Figures report, one in nine people age 65 or older has some form of dementia; for those over 85 it’s closer to one third. Those numbers translate into a lot of us trying to make sense out of something so senseless. And what we do, for the most part, is tell each other stories. We allow flares of black humor, we invent our own metaphors. This is, I say, like trying to fix a leaky boat in the middle of the ocean. This is, my friend says, like making pencil lines lower and lower on the doorframe. This is, another friend writes, a process of mourning by degrees. Canceling the Netflix account because my detailed DVD-player instructions are no longer enough; taking away the car keys; removing the knobs from the stove. A housekeeper, part-time help, a live-in aide. Each new development is like entries in the world’s worst baby book.

4.
Thomas’s portrait of how the disease cuts through lives is on the mark and sensitive; he gets it all right, and anyone who has lived those cycles of denials and acceptance will recognize herself, or someone else. In the period before Ed’s diagnosis, when both he and Eileen are convinced that they just need to try a little harder (If she would just pay more attention), Eileen tells herself,

He would listen to her. He had always been good at listening to her. As he got older and more fixed in his fears and habits, she had to shout a little louder to be heard, but once he heard her, if he could stomach what she was asking for, he did what she asked…He needed to regroup, to see new possibilities, to think bigger than ever. If there was anything she could help him with, it was thinking big.

Ed’s own resolution, whether for her benefit or his own — Thomas never approaches the story from his viewpoint — is that “I’ve been meaning to spend more time attending to my needs…I’ve had a cloudy head for a while. I’m trying to get back to basics.”

Eileen keeps him at home as long as she can, though a life of careful planning can’t help her here:

She spent all morning [at work] worrying about him screwing it up. He needed perfect accuracy to pull it off. If he hit any button other than start, he ended up gnawing on frozen manicotti or choking down cold beef stew. She came home to the time unchanged on the microwave, half the meal on the floor, a broken plate under the table, the Times intact in its sleeve.

Even when he is eventually moved to a care facility, she keeps tight control of her own vision — all that’s left to her:

She wasn’t visiting. What she was doing was seeing her husband after work. It was simply a part of her day. She was showing them that Ed might be there with them instead of home where he belonged, but nothing else had changed…They had no clue what kind of man had fallen into their lap, but she wasn’t going to explain it to them, because they didn’t deserve to hear it.

It’s a shape-shifter of a disease; as soon as you understand what you’re dealing with, everything changes again. Who can begrudge Eileen her excuses and her bargaining? It’s hard to hit a moving target.

5.
People tell me what a good daughter I am, how attentive and patient. I am not, I want to say. I lean too much on my older sister, whine about losing my weekends, dread changing my mother’s Depends in restaurant bathrooms. But I love her enormously, and I show up. Still, I’m not a natural caregiver. I was a good mother, but that was all animal instinct. Otherwise it’s not part of my makeup.

I was, frankly, spoiled rotten as a child, never really encouraged to look outward. This was partly because it was the ’70s — awful as the nickname is, the “Me Generation” isn’t too far off the mark — but also because of the way our family worked. My mother compensated for her own hardships — she grew up during the Depression with an ill and often absent mother, her first marriage failed, and her second, to my father, was difficult as well — by throwing herself into mothering me, the much-adored late-in-life baby. I wasn’t literally an only child, but I was raised like one. “Make sure you take care of yourself first,” she always advised me. And I did.

My father’s health began to fail when I was barely into my 20s, probably the result of a series of mini-strokes that, coupled with diabetes, progressively disabled him and killed him at age 69. I say probably because I don’t know and didn’t push for more information; I was just out of college, with a new husband, a new baby, and, soon, a new divorce; I had troubles of my own. My dad and I had butted heads when I was an adolescent, especially after my parents divorced, and a whiff of that still clung — which is to say I was mostly self-involved and selfish.

Fortunately my presence wasn’t needed. My father’s partner quit her job and cared for him cheerfully, tirelessly. She was — and is — unfailingly kind to me, effectively letting me off the hook for all my deficiencies. But years later, the work of caring for my mother would bring everything rushing in: how emotionally absent I was in my dad’s last years, how thoroughly I failed him. I carry that with me always.

6.
And this is what I found deeply admirable about We Are Not Ourselves. Even more than the novel’s scrupulous depiction of Alzheimer’s, I appreciated the fact that neither Eileen nor Connell is a natural caretaker. They stumble through Ed’s first symptoms, his diagnosis, and the long-term management of his illness in very human, recognizable ways. They’re never saints; never martyrs. They have no choice but to play out the hand they’ve been dealt, and they’re not always graceful about it.

For all Eileen’s experience in caring for others, she has never quite mastered the art of compassion — the luxury, she would say. Having been scornful, as a teenager, of her mother’s late-in-life immersion in AA — “the down-and-outers…who’d wrecked their lives and slipped into a spiral of regret” — Eileen believes the issue “wasn’t negative thinking, it was too little positive thinking on the part of everyone around her.” Ed’s illness forces her into something resembling a Twelve-Step program of her own, with its requisite admissions of powerlessness. But she never quite loses her hard edges; they’re what’s kept her going all these years.

And poor Connell is a mess, his protracted middle-class adolescence in constant opposition to his father’s needs. He stays out late or doesn’t come home at all, leaves a barely functioning Ed home alone so he can go out with friends. He’s not callous, just conflicted and a bit spoiled. Eventually he rises to the task, but we wince — in my case, in sympathy — at how long it takes.

I didn’t know enough, when my dad became ill, to fear my own selfishness. These days, though, the worry follows me around. I’m a good daughter now, while my mother still recognizes me, while she’s still at home and we can sit on her couch and look at pictures of the great-grandbabies on my phone. But what about the next phase, and the ones after that? Will I do the right things? Will I still be able to resurrect my love for the person she’ll become, and will I honestly feel it?

It would be reductive to call We Are Not Ourselves an “Alzheimer’s novel.” Among other things, it’s an elegy for the middle class in urban America, and for the social mobility we insist on believing in. And it offers a lively portrait of a changing New York. Still, Matthew Thomas does his readers a great kindness in giving us Eileen and Connell’s complicated love for Ed, their good intentions and their mistakes: he offers up benevolence in the form of a story. Sometimes you just go through the motions. Sometimes you just show up.

We Are Not Ourselves isn’t literary group therapy. But it spotlights a dark place that most of us can count on visiting at some point — and shining that light on our collective fear is what a novelist, often, does better than anyone.

Click here to read Bloom’s Q&A with Matthew Thomas.

Click here to read about “Post-40 Bloomers,” a new monthly feature at The Millions.

1.
Fifteen years-plus in the making, Mary Costello’s first story collection, The China Factory, is the work of a serious and talented writer. The experience of reading it was a curious one, which is to say compelling: I found myself not wanting to put the book down, and when I did, it was difficult to pick it back up. The resistance was emotional – there is much sadness, of the starkly honest and lonely variety, in Costello’s stories. She gets it so right – achingly right – how love and loss are indistinguishable.

Every time I girded up and continued, however, I was rewarded, and without delay; there is little warm-up period when you enter each of these stories. You are there, on the underside of a character’s skin, in her mind, behind his sightline, swimming pacifically in the underwaterness of their emotions, somehow muted and color-sharp at once. If there is something that ties these stories together, it is not so heady as a theme, like “the existential state of aloneness.” It is more that loneliness envelops the world of each story like a living, moving thing, and in the opening sentences, a kind of emotional atmosphere opens up, like a tiny mouth, where the reader enters, slips in quietly, whereupon the mouth closes, seals the reader in. If this description strikes you as sexual, then it’s not far off; these stories want all of you, mind and body and soul, like a consummation.

2.
Mary Costello is not a formally trained writer of the creative-writing-program ilk. Now in her mid-40s, she has been a primary school teacher in Dublin for the last 20-some years. She started writing stories in her early twenties – before that, it had never occurred to her in any serious way that she might be a writer – and had early success with two stories, one published in Ireland’s (now-defunct) Sunday Tribune, the other shortlisted for the Hennessy Literary Award. She enrolled in a creative writing class back then, and attended a writers’ conference; but then her full-time work as a teacher took precedence, and, as she puts it, “life intervened,” she was not connected with a literary community, and she didn’t publish another story until 2010. It was The Stinging Fly literary magazine – champions especially of new Irish writers and the short-story form — that accepted her stories, and subsequently The Stinging Fly Press (founded in 2005, with four titles in print) that approached her about publishing a collection – which was released this past spring. It’s a wonderful Cinderella story, to my mind: the book received an enthusiastic review in The Guardian from the likes of Anne Enright.

3.
As an autodidact who has labored, slowly, quietly, over the years, Costello demonstrates impressive story craft; her stories’ openings strike me as wonderfully instructive examples – classroom worthy — of getting right to it.
Outside my room the wind whistles. It blows down behind our row of houses, past all the bedroom windows and when I try to imagine the other bedrooms and the other husbands and wives inside, I hear my own husband moving about downstairs. (“Things I See”)

He left behind the warm waters of the bay, the seaweed, the blue of the Burren. He swam in a current of his own and hovered, like a skydiver in the dark. He would swim out far, underwater, to the Continental Shelf. He no longer felt man, but marine. He had a need to reach the depths, to glide to the silent darkness and feel the cold brush of luminous sea creatures […] In the shelter he dressed and wrung out his swimming trunks. He combed his hair and felt himself coming back to the world. Mona would be in the kitchen at that moment, clearing away the breakfast things. (“Sleeping With a Stranger”)

The summer I turned seventeen I worked as a sponger in a china factory. I walked to the end of our road every morning to catch my lift to the city with Gus Meehan, and every evening I came home with a film of fine dust lodged in the pores of my skin. From the back seat I had a view of Gus’s broad shoulders and the china clay caked in the creases of his neck and in his grey hair […] Gus was shy and deferential to everyone […] He had a slight stammer and drew his meaty hands close to him on the steering wheel, as if they might cause offence. (“The China Factory”)

He hears music when he wakes these mornings. The notes float up from below, pouring softly into the room, and for a moment he thinks it is Miriam, Miriam perched on the piano stool with her legs swinging and the purple-flowered wallpaper swirling around her and the notes spilling from her fingers […] He says nothing to Marie because, of course, there is no music, the music is in his head and Miriam is in Canada, a grown woman living alone in a beautiful glass house set into a wooded hill above Vancouver. (“Little Disturbances”)
I give these to you in succession like this because we can see, cumulatively, Costello’s gift for storytelling: expertly, simply, she lets us know, in these first words, both what the story is going to be about, and, beneath the surface of place and players and events, what the story is going to be about. The intimacies and dissonances, longings and losses, they are all here, plainly, in these first sentences; if emerging delicately from the shadows.

And it’s that understated, umbrous quality that draws us in and forward: the sense that ordinary lives are filled with extraordinary desire and disenchantment. In “Things I See,” a woman and her stay-at-home husband live together in persistent tension, while they also carry the shared, unspoken memory of his making a pass at her younger sister years before. In “Sleeping With a Stranger,” a man remembers a one-night extramarital intimacy, never confessed, and clings to it, while at his mother’s deathbed. In “Little Disturbances” an elderly man has the (correct) premonition of terminal illness, and his regrets begin to haunt him, the limitations of love both given and received. And in the title story, a woman looks back on the working-class life she escaped, via memories of the tragic death of a neighbor — a distant relative and factory co-worker who once acted heroically and prevented a mass murder.

4.
Of the 12 stories in the collection, five feature male protagonists, either written in first person or close-third. I was interested to note that my three favorite stories were among these five. If Costello sometimes falters, for me it was evident in a pattern of narrative overreaching – forcing emotional exposition — toward the climax and conclusion in a few of the stories, particularly those featuring female protagonists. From “This Falling Sickness,” a story about the death of a woman’s ex-husband in a climbing accident, the shock of which brings back to her the death of their young son and the subsequent unraveling of the marriage:
She wanted to flee the graveyard and find their island out in the bay and run all day over the long grass and the dunes until she reached the pristine beach with the immaculate sands. There she would lie down in the dark. She would whisper his name to the sands; she would tell him there is no giving like the first giving, that what is given first cannot be regiven, what is first taken cannot be retaken. She would tell him she would never be the same again, or give the same or receive the same or love the same, that it was in him that all possibilities were first encountered, all beauty, all hope concentrated, that he had gone now and taken something and it could not be recovered and she left here, now, impaired, diminished, she was left wanting.
This passage reads like a bit like an exercise, an author’s note to self — the answer to the question, “What’s the emotional takeaway of this story?” It is the articulation of what wants to be evoked through action and detail, what the reader should feel – what the reader might well feel – at this late point in the story, if we weren’t so explicitly told to feel it.

5.
I wrote to Mary Costello with a few questions. About her male-centered stories, she said that, for her, a story “usually starts with a character, or a character at a particular moment. It makes little difference to me if the character is male or female […] I find that when it comes to things of the heart we are amazingly similar and I write the male character’s story no differently to the female’s.” So perhaps my observation about emotional exposition is simply coincidental. One wonders, though, if there isn’t something to the notion that when we have a bit of distance from a character, we can see him, and his journey, more lucidly, can render with a lighter touch.

I also asked her about marital relationships in the stories. In her review, Anne Enright observed that “Costello’s characters are lonely, especially when they are in a relationship,” and described their sorrow as an “immaculate sadness.” This theme – of deep loneliness within marriage – is indeed evident throughout the collection. The layering of time, familiarity, unfulfilled hopes, and sometimes tragedy, erects walls between spouses that can neither be cracked open nor abandoned. From “Things I See”—
And I think this is how things are, and this is how they will remain, and with every new night and every new wind I know that I am cornered too, and I will remain, because I cannot unlove him.
And from “Insomniac”—
‘When did you grow this cruel?’ She is talking into the dark.
He wonders what time it is. He thinks of time like a small worm crawling across the earth. He opens his mouth and whispers, ‘Go back to bed.’
These are not couples for whom parting ways is on the horizon; rather, these are men and women who will live inside their estrangement, who will bear it, and continue on. “I wasn’t at all conscious of this theme,” wrote Costello, “or of attempting to say anything about marriage – or anything else! These threads simply emerged, unknown to me. The stories were written over many years – some over fifteen and more years ago – and there was little awareness of anything other than writing each story when it needed to be written.” Costello herself was married for 10 years, when she was in her twenties.

Are the stories in The China Factory hopeless? I ask this question often of literary fiction; the answer is important to me. Interestingly, the question doesn’t seem quite right in Costello’s case. Strictly speaking, perhaps yes, there is a sense in which these characters are suspended in a state of unchanging melancholy and loss; but as Costello herself says, she is most interested in moments of “heightened states of fear,” which can bring “great awareness and clarity” – which is, you could say, a kind of hope. “Sorrow and grief are very present,” she went on, “because most people encounter these emotions and I cannot imagine not examining them – a fully lived life demands that we pore over them.”

And as to whether this melancholy is in some way an “Irish thing” (something I wondered about), Costello is of two minds:
I don’t know if there is something uniquely sad or tragic about the Irish voice? I think a great melancholy pervades the stories of many writers from many nations.

But the Irish are or were often regarded as inward looking, as having an introverted nature. Perhaps it’s our troubled past, our history, the legacy of oppression and famine and loss – loss of our language as well as our land – that has carved itself into our psyches and laid itself down in our blueprint, causing the melancholy to attach itself and linger.

I don’t know. My own feeling is that it’s the writer’s own inner landscape, her own personal unconscious rather than the collective unconscious of the nation, that shapes the stories and imbues them with their particular qualities.
6.
Currently on hiatus from teaching to focus on new stories and a novel (or two), Mary Costello is hitting her stride. She has blogged about her fears as a debut author, the daily struggles of writing; further evidence, to my mind, that she is now firmly walking in the shoes of a writer, blooming in good time.