How to Age Disgracefully

“They’d play gently competitive games of bingo and spend happy hours collaborating over giant jigsaw puzzles.”

Lydia’s expectations of what activities she will plan for the senior social club proves an ironic contrast to the activities the group actually undertakes, challenging Age-Based Prejudice and Perceptions of Aging. As a woman reaching menopause, Lydia also faces a new phase of life in a different way than the children and seniors, providing a new perspective on the theme of aging.

“It was fair to say that Lydia’s first day back in paid employment in twenty years had not been an unmitigated success.”

This dry understatement is Lydia’s observation at her first meeting of the social club, when a collapsing ceiling kills Pauline. It is an example of the type of humor that Pooley employs throughout the novel. Pauline’s death is handled lightly, while the larger concern about repairing the social center becomes the motivation that unites the characters. This passage also reflects the starting point of Lydia’s character arc, in which she is uncertain of herself and her abilities.

“Why was it that people assumed you could throw a total group of strangers together and just because they were approximately the same age, they’d get along? It might work with five-year-olds, but not with septuagenarians who’d accumulated vastly different life experience, bad habits, and entrenched opinions.”

Daphne’s impression of the motive behind the senior social club touches on a common theme of the book, Age-Based Prejudice and Perceptions of Aging. However, both the young children and the older adults will find genuine friendships over the course of the novel. In a further irony, Daphne, too, will find friendships among her new colleagues.

“‘Where’s the fun in aging gracefully?’ said Daphne. ‘Personally, I intend to age as disgracefully as possible.’”

Daphne’s humorous pun offers the title of the book as well as one of its messages: Maturity of years does not mean one needs to stop living life with enjoyment. There’s a further irony in that Daphne, with her wealth and health, is in fact the most graceful among them, but she is also the one who least cares what other people think.

“Ziggy had been propelled from a stationery cupboard into a parallel universe which he hadn’t chosen and didn’t understand and from which he couldn’t escape.”

This passage, which follows an allusion to the children’s book The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, conveys Ziggy’s bewilderment at finding himself a teen father. Several of the characters struggle with the sense that their life is unfolding quite differently from what they have planned, and Ziggy shares with them the wish to improve his situation, speaking to Reinventing and Rediscovering Oneself.

“Daphne had never understood dogs. Cats she rather admired. They walked their own path. They were independent and wily, and doled out affection sparingly and only when they had an agenda.”

Daphne’s description of her pet preferences works on an ironic level because her opinion of cats defines Daphne’s personality as well. However, getting involved with Maggie the dog, and with other people who are more affectionate and less wily, will bring Daphne joy and teach her The Importance of Social Bonds.

“He’d imagined being a hugely famous actor, surrounded by loving family and friends, mobbed by hysterical fans proffering various body parts to be autographed wherever he went. Not an old man whose family refused to speak to him, whose career was ending before it had ever really taken off, and who couldn’t even get noticed when he flagrantly flouted the law.”

The contrast between what a character wanted or imagined for their life, and what they actually experience, is a dilemma that all four protagonists share in some fashion. Art’s sense of failure also confronts Lydia and Ziggy, which helps them relate to and understand one another.

“If she could only get YouTube to snuggle on the sofa with her, drinking martinis and watching reality TV, she’d be able to abandon this whole dating malarkey.”

Daphne’s mastery of the internet and YouTube, once she acquires her prized iPhone, is a running joke, but it also subverts the stereotype of seniors who are hopeless with the latest technology. As part of her character arc, Daphne is moving away from living in a virtual, self-enclosed world and beginning to connect with real people, with all their flaws and eccentricities.

“No, dear boy. I’m all about burning my bridges. There’s never any point in going back.”

When Art challenges Daphne about her twist on a standard cliché, Daphne counters with this philosophy about burning bridges instead of building them. Ironically, while Daphne’s attempt to re-emerge into the world will lead to her leaving the country—another bridge burned—the relationships she’s made will endure this distance, showing The Importance of Social Bonds.

“You are not a doormat for them to wipe their feet on. You are a grown woman, at the height of her powers. You just need to channel them.”

Daphne’s lecture to Lydia about standing up for herself is one of several ways that Daphne, with her confident attitude, inspires her new friends to embrace Reinventing and Rediscovering Oneself. Daphne challenges the assumption that women grow less desirable or interesting with age, encouraging Lydia to fight assumptions that women in middle-age are unattractive or invisible.

“He wasn’t invisible when he was with the kids. Everyone noticed them, smiled at them, asked how they could help. The children were a magic portal back into his old world.”

Art, like the other main characters, experiences the sense of feeling invisible in his life because of Age-Based Prejudice and Perspectives of Aging. Here, he thinks humorously in terms of using the nursery children as props to get himself attention, but he is also slowly learning to form connections and use his skills.

“[William’s family] made huge efforts to ensure [Art] felt loved and included, not knowing that, much as he adored them, they were a constant, painful reminder to him of everything he’d lost.”

While his friendship with William and William’s happy family sustains him, Art’s character obstacle, and wound, is that he misses his own family, or what remains of them. The bonds that unite people—through friendship, blood, and found or made family—all reflect The Importance of Social Bonds in the novel.

“What were you expecting? Lace doilies, swirly wall-to-wall carpets and a dusty collection of china figurines on a mantelpiece? […] It’s incredible how everyone always typecasts the elderly.”

Daphne’s tart response when Lydia is impressed by the design and elegance of Daphne’s apartment speaks to the way Pooley continually upends, and pokes fun at, assumptions made about older adults—here, a stereotype of how a woman of 70 might decorate.

“It would take more than a kiss to set her alight these days. It would take a can of gasoline and some matches, and even that was unlikely to achieve more than a slow smolder.”

One of the dryest and most humorous voices in the novel is Daphne’s, who has this reflection on her capacity for physical desire when Sidney kisses her. While Pooley makes fun of assumptions about age and aging, she also deals with certain realities, like menopause, decreasing mobility, and sex drive.

“That was a sentiment Daphne could understand. After all, wasn’t it exactly what she’d done fifteen years ago? Although in a very different way. It wasn’t herself that she’d got arrested.”

Daphne’s reflection, in response to Art’s arrest, adds to the building suspense about her past. Foreshadowing becomes heavier as the novel progresses, until the ultimate reveal that Daphne caused her husband’s arrest and then went into hiding with his stolen goods.

“It felt good to rid yourself of things you no longer needed, things that were weighing you down.”

Lydia has this thought when she helps clean out Art’s house of stolen items, giving him a fresh start, but this need for a weed-out also applies to her own life as she considers what to do about her husband. All four of the major characters get a fresh start on their lives by letting go of the things holding them down, and/or recovering from past mistakes. This speaks to Reinventing and Rediscovering Oneself.

“Was that the definition of a friend? Someone whose opinion you actually cared about? Perhaps it was.”

The novel uses the examples of the relationships Daphne builds when she finally emerges from hiding in its exploration of The Importance of Social Bonds. Daphne, who has always had to look out for herself, has never actually had friends, and is only now learning what friendship means.

“Daphne was almost unnervingly impressive. So clear, logical, and persuasive. Anyone would have thought she’d been outlining complex strategies for years.”

As part of the novel’s mission to defy age-based stereotypes, Daphne is a unique, larger-than-life character with her steely courage, criminal background, and strategic mind. Her gift for planning is used as foreshadowing for the revelation about her past, but her involvement as the mastermind behind the Jones gang also defies stereotypes about female intelligence and wishes. Daphne defies all sorts of conventions, undermining Age-Based Prejudice and Perceptions of Aging.

“She’d forgotten, holed up in Hammersmith for so many years, what a magnificent city she lived in. She was going to miss it.”

The setting of London, more specifically the neighborhood known as Hammersmith (See: Background), gives the novel a cosmopolitan feel and the ironic contrast that, while their community seems quite small, events of the novel are taking place against the backdrop of a large and bustling city. Daphne’s musings about leaving just as her relationships are solidifying provides a note of foreshadowing and suspense to the later chapters of the novel.

“She had loved him once, more even than she’d loved herself. And perhaps that was the problem.”

All of the four major characters experience an arc of Reinventing and Rediscovering Oneself after feeling they have lost themselves. Lydia’s challenge comes to a head when she confronts her husband’s infidelity on top of experiencing an empty nest and menopause. However, Jeremy’s rejection makes her realize she needs to reclaim her self-respect, which she accomplishes with the help of her new friends.

“For the first time since she could remember, Daphne cried. She’d thought she was gradually learning to love again. She’d thought she’d found someone who could genuinely love her back. She’d thought she could see a future where she wasn’t alone.”

Daphne sees karmic retribution in how Sidney turns out to be a con man rather than someone who cares for her; the irony is that Daphne doesn’t yet realize it is Art who genuinely sees and appreciates her. The message of the novel leans on The Importance of Social Bonds, depicting them as necessary for a fulfilling life.

“I’ve been hiding for so long […] for the past fifteen years. I’ve done some terrible things, and now it’s all catching up with me.”

Against the theme of Reinventing and Rediscovering Oneself, Daphne wonders if she can ever truly escape her past and the things she was part of as Jack’s wife and accomplice. The other characters echo this theme in likewise contemplating how they might make up for, or overcome, the consequences of poor choices.

“None of them would be here now if it weren’t for [Daphne]. They were changed, as if her energy had somehow leeched into them all, without them noticing.”

Art, who initially thought of Daphne as a harridan and an adversary, comes to admire and love her during the course of the novel. He recognizes she is the catalyst that has helped transform all of the major characters, providing inspiration, courage, and guidance.