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.
In an age of ubiquitous self-revelation, I consider myself discreet: I don’t gossip, don’t share intimate information — mine or others’ — in public places. The idea of discussing my physical or mental health, or personal, professional, or financial struggles, with anyone other than close friends or family feels wrong. I know many do so gladly in the name of openness, destigmatization, and shining a light on our underlying commonalities. That’s fine.
Me, I don’t even want to fill in my relationship status on Facebook.
But this doesn’t mean I’m not interested in other people’s.
A quick and unscientific survey of my Friends, for instance, reveals that most married people identify as married. Beyond that it falls off steeply: a few show up as single or in a relationship, one or two as divorced (many more actually are), one friend as widowed. And, for whatever reasons, no one in my Friend universe has checked off “It’s complicated.”
And what does that mean, anyway? I imagine various possibilities involving too many words for a pull-down menu — a nonexclusive relationship, or maybe an unrequited one, or a breakup that has lasted way past its expiration date.
But really, if we’re talking about relationships, doesn’t “It’s Complicated” apply to everyone? Of course it’s complicated — relationships with lovers, spouses, friends, enemies, parents, children, siblings, coworkers, neighbors. The complexity of human bonds is endlessly fascinating; this is why we tell stories, and why we read them.
Telling them well, though — doing justice to the endless entanglements we navigate every day — calls for emotional intelligence and a steady hand. Debuting with her first book of stories You Should Pity Us Instead (Sarabande) at age 45, Amy Gustine answers that call and demonstrates a deep respect for those complications.
2.
Each story in You Should Pity Us Instead approaches then strips away the cliché at the center of a relationship — the insufficiently parented child, the unfaithful husband, the obsessively fearful new mother, the black son of a white adoptive family — replacing it with something finely tuned and delicate. And yet there is nothing ephemeral about Gustine’s characters. Each exists in careful balance to their partners, antagonists, and kin, but at the same time their integrity shines, unshakeable.
“In order to even begin writing I’ve got to have some sense of there being an irresolvable complexity, even contradiction, in the story,” says Gustine. “It’s unpacking the contradiction and nuance through the events and the dialogue that makes writing intriguing. Consistency and singularity are boring.”
Thus you have Sarah in “Half-Life,” a 22-year-old nanny only recently aged out of the foster care system who is trying to work out what she needs to know as an adult through the children she cares for. Or Spencer, from the story “Goldene Medene,” an Ellis Island intake doctor whose recent heartbreak clouds his judgment about the immigrants whose lives he holds in his hands.
Or Shayla and Mike in “Prisoners Do,” two doctors engaged in an extramarital affair for whom nothing is simple: Mike is the caretaker for his disabled wife and three young daughters; Shayla’s mother has metastatic brain cancer. Locked in their respective orbits, the titular prisoners circle ever closer but their paths never align. Gustine takes their measure as they cycle through the messiness of desire, envy, disaffection.
His daughter had sounded very sweet, and that simple exchange they had—’Is your Dad home?’ ‘Sure, may I tell him who’s calling?’ — had brought her heart into her throat and Shayla didn’t know why. She really, truly had been fine with no kids. Was still, when she thought about it, fine. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was something else.
3.
These are grownup stories. The author’s powers of perception and empathy have been honed over a lifetime. Gustine’s parents divorced when she was young, and both sets of grandparents stepped in to help raise her — growing up she felt, she said, that she had six parents and four households, each with its own rules and mores.
Without being aware of it, my sister and I learned how to fit in with each one. Jokes you might make to my dad wouldn’t be okay with my grandparents. Shows that Grandma might watch with us, like a soap opera, wouldn’t be approved of by Dad. Sometimes I think juggling four different microcultures, as well as the culture of our private Catholic school, which was yet again very different from our home cultures, is what created a certain fascination with families, with relationships, and a certain empathetic imagination.
Always a reader, Gustine found books to be a perfect portable comfort. “When you move from house to house all week every week, and you don’t have your own bedroom,” she explains, “a book is a marvelous little thing that you can carry easily. You can just about live in it.” She read everything from Little Women to the Trixie Belden series to James Michener and V.C. Andrews (the latter two were lying around her grandparents’ houses) and, in high school, the Russians — Leo Tolstoy, and even more so Fyodor Dostoevsky — and Milan Kundera.
Gustine always considered herself a writer, she says, typing at an old metal desk in her grandmother’s basement. She wrote on weekends while working full-time after attending the University of Michigan, then earned an MFA at Bowling Green State University when her daughter was a toddler. When her son was born four years later, she stayed home with him for the first year and then started him in daycare and began writing full-time.
“Even though I knew I shouldn’t, sometimes I felt self-indulgent sending them off while I wrote,” she admits. “If I’d been getting a regular paycheck for the work, I doubt I would have felt that way. I did my best to ignore those feelings and push ahead.”
There were dry spells and productive periods,” Gustine adds. You Should Pity Us Instead gathers stories written over 15 years, most published one at a time in literary journals beginning with “An Uncontaminated Soul” when she was 35.
Two stories, “The River Warta” and “Goldene Medene” (a title that needs to be spoken out loud with the proper Yiddish inflection, GOLdeneh MEDeneh), were pulled from a collection of linked fiction based on her family’s immigrant experience at the turn of the century, which she began at Bowling Green; the rest emerged gradually. “I chose those to include based on two criteria: how much I liked them and whether or not they seemed to fit a family or parent-child relationship theme.” And as every one of us knows, family relationships are invariably complicated.
Take even a straightforward setup like a mother and an absent, beloved son. “All the Sons of Cain” opens the collection with palpable tension, a crowd of anonymous protestors milling outside a grieving woman’s bedroom:
After they find out where she lives, they start coming every week, sometimes every day. Wednesday morning they come especially early, waking her. R’s mother stays in bed, yearning for coffee and the bathroom, but fearful of nearing the window.
Her son, a young Israeli soldier captured by Hamas, has been turned into the conflict’s literal poster child, his photograph hoisted on their placards: “Sometimes they use him to protest another prisoner trade, sometimes to support it; sometimes to urge settlements, other times to condemn those already built.” His mother believes him dead. But when he turns up on the television news in a video, claiming to have converted to Islam and holding a recently dated newspaper, she grabs a change of clothes and a handful of old photographs and departs for Gaza to find him. Here, as throughout the book, Gustine shows her flair for painting a simultaneously interior and exterior portrait — micro and macro — with the same strokes:
As her plane descends into Cairo’s International Airport, R’s mother looks down on the glittering high-rises lining the Nile’s shore, then inland, to the raw-concrete worker’s homes, squatting in twilight. To the east is the City of the Dead, crumbling, necropolitan mustards, and to the west the dark, ancient deserts of Giza’s tombs, so singular and grand they strike her not as burial plots, but as alien settlements. Everywhere there are minarets, looking from above like missiles.
R’s mother doesn’t succeed on her mission. Instead, she finds other sons, and other mothers; a 13-year-old boy from the street who alternately taunts her and aids her, a young girl whose difficult birth she helps with in the back of a dark house. Still, this is not a heartwarming story of shared humanity. There is no great equalizing blanket of motherhood, or longing, or need. This is in fact a recurring pattern in the complications of Gustine’s characters’ lives: what could serve as a common thread and, in a simpler version of the world, bring them together, more often drives them apart.
4.
Gustine’s characters’ relationship to faith — as a common language, a redemptive power — is, like all other relationships in Gustine’s stories, complicated. In the book’s title story, Molly, the wife of an academic who has written a Christopher Hitchens–like polemic against religion, moves with her family from Berkeley to her Ohio hometown, where her husband, Simon, has taken a position as chair of a philosophy department. Soon she realizes that their publicly atheist beliefs are in a stark minority. Once Simon’s book has been featured in a newspaper article, they also find that “invites to card nights and progressive dinners have dried up and the girls have been skipped over for several birthday parties and sleepovers.”
Molly’s relationship to her own faith, or lack of it, is complicated both by her desire for community — for herself, for her daughters — and the fact that her beloved grandfather, whom she visits daily, is growing frail. “Everybody’s going to die,” her husband tells the girls, but this isn’t enough of an answer for any of them. The question of where faith fits into this puzzle hangs over them all; even its absence is couched in the language of belief:
One day she looks up from her book and sees that the elm’s ten thousand pods, which blanketed the gardens in late May, have sprouted. Somehow this mindless, unwanted propagation makes being lonely okay. Even in the form of a plant, the world has violence and invasion at its core. Being lonely is the least you can expect. It’s so light a disappointment, it almost counts as a blessing.
Perhaps because of her Catholic upbringing, the spiritual questions Gustine’s characters ask wear a well-worn luster. “When We’re Innocent,” for instance, while not explicitly religious, is a story of the complications that come with (or without) belief: culpability, guilt, and the ways we grant each other mercy. Obi, who has come to Phoenix to clean out his daughter Jolly’s apartment, doesn’t know if her death by overdose was accidental or a suicide. Brian, who lives next door and is awaiting a trial on rape charges, is unsure of whether — or perhaps unwilling to admit that — the sex with a woman he met online was non-consensual. The two sit in Brian’s apartment, crushed by their unanswered questions, able to offer each other sympathy but not salvation.
‘What am I going to tell her mother?’ [Obi] bleated, bowing his head and pinching the bridge of his nose until his knuckles went white. ‘She had to have a reason.’
‘Tell her it was my fault,’ Brian said. ‘Tell her Jolly lived next door to a depraved soul unworthy of her, and if he’d only been a better man, Jolly would still be here.’
5.
The state of loneliness — when relationships have gone awry or missing — is layered with complications as well. Lavinia, in “An Uncontaminated Soul,” is, bluntly, a cat lady. Widowed, living in her late mother’s house next door to her nemesis, the hostile and meddlesome old man Pultwock, she shares her cat food-slippery, piss-smelling home with 56 cats; her granddaughter is no longer allowed to visit.
But love is love, and Lavinia — actually Mary, a lover of literature who renamed herself after “Emily Dickinson’s sister who liked cats” — is alternately convivial and achingly tender with her feline charges. After rescuing two newborn kittens from a hot car,
she pinches their flesh and rubs her finger along their gums. Each is a bit sticky, so she sets up the humidifier in her bedroom, shooing out all the other cats, and installs the kittens in a box lined with sheepskin car-seat covers from the towed Olds.
In the kitchen Lavinia warms milk, corn oil, salt, and egg yolks on the stove, then feeds each kitten with a doll’s bottle. Afterward, she massages their genitals with a warm, moist cotton ball and they relieve themselves in her palm. She prefers to do it that way at first, so she can be sure who did what and how much.
Her story doesn’t end well. But in the process of pulling at our hearts, Gustine also asks something of us: that we not only rethink the dismissive trope of “cat lady,” but also that of the angry old man who eventually calls the Humane Society on her. In his catless loneliness, Pultwock — whose mien is as abrasive as his name, but whose own heartache the reader catches just a glimpse of — may be even more desperate for love than she.
6.
“You should pity us who have no faith. We’re lonely and anxious,” says Molly to her fellow Midwestern mothers in an attempt at lightheartedness. The truth being, of course, that we are, all of us, lonely and anxious in our unending search for connection amidst messy, imperfect lives.
“It might go back to the issue of contradiction,” Gustine admits. “I don’t believe in purity. There’s good in bad and bad in good. There are no easy, straightforward situations or solutions.”
Its title to the contrary, You Should Pity Us Instead is a book distinctly devoid of pity. Gustine treats her characters — and thus her readers — with dignity and compassion. Our complications, she demonstrates with each story, may drive us and often damage us, but they’re important.
“All meaning seems to derive from connection to others and all connection requires caretaking, inevitably leading to a conflict between duty and pleasure,” she says. “So to live a meaningful life we must at some point sacrifice pleasure. That’s a paradox: to feel pleased we must not be pleased all the time.”
True, it’s complicated. But, Gustine wants us to see, it couldn’t — and shouldn’t — be any other way.
Two words: Norman Rush.
Born 1933. Had a life as a book dealer and then a Peace Corps director in Africa before publishing his first story in The New Yorker in 1978, in his mid-40s. First book, Whites, a model short-story collection, arrives in 1986, at the age of 53; it becomes a Pulitzer finalist. First novel, Mating, follows in 1991, when he is pushing 60. It wins the National Book Award, and it’s a totally remarkable reading experience. Followed by an impressive follow-up, Mortals in 2003. Look at those dates and I think it tells the story: the man is an endless polisher and perfectionist, and it pays off.
Very excited about this. Onward!
I’m excited, and encouraged, to read about the launch of this new column. As a (relatively) new forty-something year old writer, I’m eager to read about others who have also started writing later, whoops, I mean, at a more mature stage of life.
What a great idea this is!
I published my first short story at 41, then went back to school for an MA in creative writing, where I was the oldest person in my cohort by 15 years. My current ambition is to complete my first book before 50. I admire the young and gifted writers out there, but I’ve stopped wishing I could have been one of them. My writing just wasn’t that good in my 20s and 30s. I was one of those people who needed to have a life before I started writing seriously and well.
Thank you, Sonya Chung and The Millions! Can’t wait to read more.
Wow. I knew “Older and Wiser” was flying around and a lot of people liked it, but I couldn’t be more thrilled to see The Millions actually taking some action in response. Thanks so much. A couple of things: one: I believe James Hannaham, the author of a really terrific novel called “God Says No” was 40 when it was published (hope he doesn’t mind me divulging his age). Also, any writer of any age who has had more than one book published and lives outside New England should check out the Grub Street Novel prize. Details can be found at http://www.grubstreet.org
Great idea. Walker Percy is a longtime favorite of mine. Norman McLean is another late bloomer who comes to mind. You might also keep an eye on Korrektiv Press. They published my first (and hopefully not last) book, House of Words, last year when I was forty-five; and they are set to publish a novel by Brian Jobe, another first-time author in his md-forties.
Love this. I believe Willa Cather was over 40 when her first novel was published- so there’s one more to the list. I commented on Martha Southgate’s great piece and love that The Millions continues on with this issue/concept. I frankly somewhat embrace being a middle aged curmudgeon, who has little interest – for the most part, of course there are MANY exceptions- of the work of 20 somethings. In Freedom, there is a wonderful, hilarious riff by Patty on her disdain for youth culture. Anyway, looking forward to this column!
From what sometimes feels like the edge of the time horizon (60), I send applause. I look forward to this discussion & hope it will include struggles as well as successes.
I love this! My first short story was published October 2010 when I was 42 and I have two books coming out in May and June 2012. Before that, I was raising five kids and writing notes on the back of diapers but I didn’t feel the overwhelming need to be published when I was younger. Now I can appreciate the ride. ;)
We’re thrilled that everyone’s excited about this feature; we have lots of good stuff on the way.
Martha: Believe it or not, Sonya started working on this column before we ran your piece, but your very compelling essay helped confirm for us that we were on the right track. It’s always interesting to discover these shared ideas floating around in the ether.
Yes! I love this idea. I am a twenty-something writer myself, but I am far more interested in learning from late-starters than the overly celebrated young and fast.
Thank you!
Thank you for this.
I love this idea! Especially the focus on self-reinvention.
One caveat — I’ve been a fan of Daniel Orozco’s for some time but wouldn’t call him a post-40s bloomer. His story Orientation was in Best American Short Stories in 1995, when he must have been in his young/mid 30s. He didn’t have a book out until this year, but he’s certainly been on the literary scene, and publishing, for a long while.
Hooray, what a brilliant post. I can now feel confident to take my steps of faith into the writing world. I do not want to take anything away from young authors, because I read and admire their work. However, I was beginning to feel that I was having a midlife crisis and my ambitions would create and flow in my head. Thank you for making me know that it is possible!
Yes yes yes. In a culture where true adulthood is often delayed until one’s 30s, that it takes until one’s 40s to have actually lived and learned enough to have something worthwhile to say makes a whole lot of sense. Consider Isak Dinesen and Walker Percy and Penelope Fitzgerald and Norman Rush as comprising a vanguard; my money’s on a healthy number of older-and-wisers making a splash in coming years.
Of course, there’s self-interest at play in my opinion. May we all bloom in good time, indeed!
I was 42 when I sent the first three chapters of a novel I had written, “The 41st Sermon” to Walker Percy. Shortly after I received his handwritten response on my cover letter: “Randy: It reads well — I’d be glad to look at rest, but must tell you I’ve had to give up finding agent or publisher for unpublished writers — I’d be doing nothing else. Everybody in South is writing a novel – Best, W.P.” I sent the MS to him and waited and waited and then in May the following year woke up one morning to read his obituary in the paper. I’d be happy to send any Percy fan interested in seeing a scan of the note an email. I’ve entered the world of epublishing so The 41st Sermon is now live on Smashwords and soon will be on Amazon.com My email address is [email protected]
I’ve been blogging about “late” bloomers from all the creative fields for about a year, but you mentioned a few writers I hadn’t heard of. Looking for to the series!
This is a wonderful essay. So many writers in low-residency MFA programs (like VCFA, where I teach) qualify as “late-bloomers” of one sort or another, and they would all benefit from your words here, Sonya.
I’m really looking forward to this column! Thank you for creating it. Just a few weeks ago I was lamenting that I’m 45 and a late bloomer, to which my friend looked me in the eye and declared: “You’re blooming.” Now I walk around thinking, “I’m blooming, I’m blooming!” :)
Excellent. Late starter is wonderful way to describe. Look forward to your posts.
Having published a debut novel a month shy of my fiftieth birthday, I feel encouraged. Thank you.
Love this. And the comment about Norman Rush, who holds a place near Tolstoy in my heart. And I’m signing up for updates, hoping to find “new” authors to read.
well, thanks for that anyway (not saying “late”). i’m 46 and the reason i’m turning to writing now is because i was busy doing other things — starting and running multiple businesses, raising a family, and other adventures. i don’t feel late. if i have enough time, i’ll eventually get around to learning how to play the drums. i won’t be “late”. you can’t do everything at once. you’ve only got so many hours in the day.
James Herriot and Jan Karon are two examples that come to my mind. Their much-loved books came out of already full lives.
In a world where youth is celebrated, it is important to highlight the depth and wisdom that accumulates with years of life experience.
Thank you for starting this series. I look forward to reading it.
Thanks for this column. I just published my first collection, at 41, and sometimes feel almost sheepish about it. As if I missed my true wave. (Which never could have happened for me at 30 — it took me ten years to write this book for a reason. For me, it was a “digging in, a deep breath, and a leap off the cliff” all at various times.) I’ve never felt this way before, but now, when talking to people, I sometimes feel reluctant to mention my age — as if (and I know this is absurd) — it will somehow diminish the work, or mark me as “not-the-next-bit-thing.” Definitely not a 20-under-40. I know this column will help.
I was nearing 50 when I started writing poetry and have just finished my 3rd collection. I find the gift of starting later is that with different career aspirations I can just enjoy the process of writing and find satisfaction in having people tell me that my work has been important to them–maybe a “reward” rather than an “Award.”
My first book was published this past July. I am 42. I’m strangely grateful that success didn’t find me sooner; I don’t think I was fully formed in my 20s. Of course I’m not now, either — but I am more in command of my powers and more aware of my weaknesses. I love this salient bit of verse from Emily Dickinson:
I shall keep singing!
Birds will pass me
On their way to Yellower Climes —
Each — with a Robin’s expectation —
I — with my Redbreast —
And my Rhymes —
Late — when I take my place in summer —
But — I shall bring a fuller tune —
Vespers — are sweeter than Matins — Signor —
Morning — only the seed of Noon —
This was pure oxygen to me – how did you know my life?! I’ve been scribbling in notebooks since childhood, something kicked in about the age of 50, another engine fired up 2 years ago, and this past spring, at the age of 59, I realized the dream: my first poetry chapbook published. Second manuscript in the works, as is a third. Thank you so much.
Thrilled! I’ve found a home for my writing self. Working with an editor on a memoir whose current working title (I’ve had over 50) is Stumbling Toward Elderhood.
A million thanks.
I started writing in my late thirties and won’t have a published book until I’m 40. I don’t see this as late. Of course I would love to have written my novel sooner, but I just wasn’t ready. The book was in my head since I was 17, but I wasn’t ready for many reason to write it any sooner. I needed the reflection and life experience to write the best work possible.
Forty isn’t as old as it was when I was 20 anyway. :)
A suggestion for your list: the great German novelist Theodor Fontane, who was approaching 60 when his magnificent first novel – Before the Storm – was published.
See G.B. [Gerald Basil] Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page.
Marvelous, I feel completely vindicated having started writing fiction at age 60!
Thanks so much.
Johanna van Zanten