Your Debut at Over 35: A pep talk for us old birds
I’m betting that JLo and Shakira will still be swinging upside down and shaking what they’ve got at eighty-years-old — perhaps just a little slower. You’ve seen them, the posts on social media that show these two women defying age stigmas alongside a picture of an “average” thirty-something woman lying on the floor like a sack of sand because she just chased her two-year-old who stole her phone. She has the phone, but not her dignity.
What’s going on here? Why are we surprised that two (dare I say it) middle-aged women are capable of doing what they set their minds to? According to a fancy chart it took two minutes to find on Google, which you can see here, the average woman is living to be 81.1 years old in the United States. Other developed countries’ averages are even higher.
I’m thirty-seven. I have yet to publish my novel.
The word “debut” is loaded. Think of “debutante,” a closely related word and defined by Merriam-Webster as “one making a debut; especially: a young woman making her formal entrance into society.” Well, fine.
Writers are notorious for being on one of two extremes: either she thinks she’s the new and improved Joan Didion or, like most of us, she’s second-guessing every other word while sitting in sweat pants and drinking from a dirty coffee mug. The last thing we need to worry about is how old we are. Add to that what race or religion and the odds against us are magnified to such a degree that we may as well be writing in space peering down at Earth, a tiny spot in the distance.
The “industry” tries to reach out to us old folk by running contests for the over-thirty crowd. How do we feel about this? Can we tell the difference between a fiction piece written by a twenty-four-year-old versus one written by a fifty-four-year-old? I don’t know the answer to this and I’m worried that it could take the industry down a rotten path. “Writing is writing,” some might say, but the same argument might be made for race and I’m not willing to get behind something that puts minorities in more of a disadvantage.
While I would like to say that age doesn’t matter, I know the truth: in some cases it does. It’s like any other profession, the older we get, the more responsibilities we choose to prioritize, the less of a chance we will have in some arenas. But that doesn’t mean we stop trying. We can learn. Think about your friend who got a Ph.D. and then had kids at forty. Is she less of a mom because she didn’t start a family at twenty-eight? Or, could it be possible that she’s wiser and more well-equipped now that she’s older? And just because you chose to have your kids first, and had to wait until they were in school to take writing seriously or you don’t have kids and are working a full time job, but have aging parents who need care, or…who cares. Whatever your situation, it’s not too late.
What I’m saying is that it’s personal, that you can’t judge yourself by what others are accomplishing. There’s enough judgment to ignore, walls to climb, and ceilings to break without bringing age into it.
Your debut at sixty-five is your sparkly outfit with a trillion prime-time viewers. They don’t call it “prime-time” for nothing.
For inspiration, here is a list of debut authors over thirty-five with an example from each link:
Soniah Kamal: An Isolated Incident published at 42
35 Over 35: Women Authors Who Debuted at 35+
Isabel Allende: House of Spirits published at 40
35 Over 35 — The American Scholar
Harriet Doerr: Stones For Ibarra published at 73
20 Debut Works of Fiction by Women Over 40
Isak Dinesen (known for Out of Africa): published Seven Gothic Tales at 49
