Older and Wiser? Hilary Boyd talks about the inspiration behind MEET ME ON THE BEACH

The heroines and heroes in my books are older people. I’m an older person myself. It was waking up one morning to find myself a Senior Citizen — baffling and shocking in equal measure – that really focused my mind. I wanted to write about what it was like to be older in the 21^st Century, not just base my female characters on memories of my youth, when I was lithe, wrinkle-free and thirty-something… well, ‘lithe’ maybe a bit of an exaggeration.

The snag is that ‘old’ and ‘sexy’ are seldom brought together in the same sentence. Not exactly breaking news to most of you, but it’s quite annoying all the same. Older people in fiction, particularly us women, are mostly relegated to the blue plastic chairs of care homes, death-bed scenes or scary dementia dramas. Which is hardly surprising, because we get such bad press in real life.

Every time you open a paper, you read about us oldies blocking younger peoples’ jobs by not retiring, living the high life on pensions our aggrieved Youth is paying for, draining the NHS… generally living a tiresomely long time. And if we do step outside the mould, like those pensioner blaggers who did the heist in Hatton Garden, that just confirms in the public eye what a worthless lot we are. But I don’t recognize myself in these dismal depictions; I refuse to be scrap-heaped.

So my heroines are mature women who fall in love, who enjoy sex, who still get a buzz from a good mani-pedi, who drag themselves to exercise classes despite being past the first flush of arthritis. These women have put in the years on the mothering front, the work front, the husband front, the responsibility front. Now they want to do their own thing, be fancy free. And why not? Don’t they deserve that luxury?

But here’s the irony. The older you get the more embedded you are with family, friends, work, the community. Without realizing it, you gradually build whole structures around your life — so not as fancy-free as you might wish. Karen, the heroine in my latest novel, is older and widowed. On paper, she can do as she pleases. But when she falls in love with the married vicar of her village, she accepts that she cannot have what she wants, in a way a younger person might not. She runs away from temptation… at first.

Because love is no respecter of age or station. You might think that being older means we have the strength and wisdom to forego lust and the thrilling obsession of love. The strength to do the far, far better thing, despite the lure being just as powerful, whether sixteen or sixty. And let’s be boringly realistic for a moment, older love does have a few snags. I’m not talking so much hip-replacements, more disapproval from friends and family, fitting into an established family structure, dealing with the upheaval of setting up a new life.

So should a mature woman like Karen resist? Should she take a deep breath and walk away, retain her ageing dignity, give up what is probably her last chance of love because she is a grown-up, horribly aware of the fallout? Or should she just go for it, throw caution to the winds, seize the moment?

I wonder what I would do, faced with this dilemma. I wonder what you would do too…

Meet Me on the Beach is our Book of the Month  – follow the link to read a free excerpt  

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