Last month, I bought myself a car. Not an expensive one, not even new(ish); just a little runaround to fill the space left when my old one died just before the pandemic and which we never replaced. The whole process was incredibly straightforward: I found a nearby dealership with excellent reviews on Trust Pilot, saw a couple online that looked good, test-drove them both and plumped for the cherry-red Corsa, which turned out to have a fantastic stereo (if slightly eccentric seatbelts) and which I already love to bits.
Up until a few years ago, I’d have dithered endlessly, pointlessly combing Auto Trader and badgering my husband (who knows less about cars than I do), fretting about whether whatever I bought might seem small, or uncool, or turn out to be a huge mistake. But cutting through all that – if you’ll excuse me – crap, is one of the things that’s great about being older: the sense that, after some, if not all, of the following; marriage, divorce, childbirth, redundancy, bereavement, peri, post or just full-on menopause, you’re just about ready for anything.
There’s a term for being a ‘woman of a certain age’, as Gregg Wallace so charmingly put it: the ‘Queenager’, a phrase coined by the journalist Eleanor Mills. For me, it sums up perfectly that moment of still feeling like the young, excitable, enthusiastic girl I was thirty years ago, but then catching sight of myself in the mirror and seeing my Mum looking back, those three decades clearly etched on my face.
When was the last time you saw a no-nonsense, high-achieving, happy women in her fifties?
It’s a club I’m happily a member of, although it has taken me a little time to get comfortable with it. What no one tells you is that your fifties bear little relation to your forties; an age equivalent of the leap between GCSEs and A levels. Suddenly you’re getting SAGA brochures in the post, friends have older partners who are talking about retiring and it dawns on you that your next decade will be your seventieth, with all that may bring.
The irony is that while so much of society – and often the media – focuses on the difficulties of ageing, for many women striking out into their fifties is a time of rediscovery and adventure. For many, the kids have flown, and menopause frees us up from monthly mood swings and painful cramps. We’ve been doing our jobs for long enough to either be at the top of our game or have opted for a less demanding role that gives us time to concentrate on other things. Financially stable, with time to start a whole new career if we want to, our fifties might just be our most powerful decade.
Where, then, are we? When was the last time you saw a no-nonsense, high-achieving, happy women in her fifties? TV and film might have embraced the ‘older woman’, with Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep flying the flag for septuagenarians and older, but where are the feisty, funny fiftysomethings? So often, in dramas, women of my age are shown as struggling with health issues, ageing parents or challenging offspring that won’t leave home.
And of course, all these issues do affect us – but that doesn’t mean that’s all our lives are about. It’s almost as if there’s no role for us until we get to be acerbic pensioners, like the characters in Richard Osman’s hugely popular Thursday Murder Club books (starring, yes, Helen Mirren). Thank goodness for the glorious Hannah Waddingham (50) in Ted Lasso, Nicola Walker (54) – who was the embodiment of the Queenager in The Split and Sarah Lancashire (60), superb in everything she does (even the Yorkshire tea ads).
For me, at least, being a Queenager is probably the most liberating era of my life, set free from the tyranny of what should be. You’ll never catch me in a carrot-leg jean, I’m more than happy to admit that I find Michelin-starred restaurants fussy and pretentious and I’ve allowed myself the luxury of deciding that I never have to watch a Shakespeare play again. Cooking on a Saturday afternoon takes place to a soundtrack of loud 90’s music (mostly Primal Scream, the Stereo MCs and Madonna).
But it’s about less frivolous things too. Recently, I had dinner with my four close girlfriends from uni – all of them look better than we did then, not because of Botox or surgery, but simply because we fully own the women we’ve become. One of us is taking early retirement, two are adjusting to empty nests, and all of us are working out what the next stage of our life will be. For me, my fifties have brought the most rewarding work of my career; my third and fourth novels and currently a foray into non-fiction, which has given me the opportunity to interview some truly fascinating people up and down the country.
The story I most want to tell is of how this era – our Queenager days – is when women can be at their most empowered and independent, when we burn most brightly. Perhaps it’s because we realise how quickly life is slipping past, or perhaps it’s because we know that youth doesn’t offer as much depth as experience. My next protagonist will be a kick-ass Queenager, with all that that entails. I can’t wait to write her.
The Moonlit Piazza by Annabelle Thorpe is published by Head of Zeus and is available now.
