Will someone please tell me what's so surprising about love stories involving older people? In February, Reader's Digest will be publishing a condensed version of The Long Walk Home as one of their "Special Editions" books featuring, as they put it, "today's hottest authors." (Nice for an older guy to be thought of as "hot," though perhaps that's not what they mean...) So the editor calls me with a few questions, one of which is, "Why a love story involving mature people?"
I just looked at the phone in disbelief.
Can you say, "Baby Boom?"
It was only a couple of months ago that the New England Journal of Medicine announced that people over the age of fifty are actively engaged in dating and sexual activity and, a couple of months earlier, that the elderly are too!
Then, on Sunday, November 18, the New York Times "Week in Review" section featured an article that marveled at the growth of movies involving older lovers. The latest, of course, is Away From Her, the new film in which a husband must come to terms with the fact that his Alzheimer's-afflicted wife, played by Julie Christie, has fallen in love with another patient in her nursing home.
Why is any of this even news? Do they think we die inside at, say, forty-five? Do they think we no longer have the capacity for love or--dare I mention it?--lust?
I'm reminded of the mother of a woman I once loved. The mother and I had formed a deep friendship. She, too, was a writer. She began having small bleeding events in her brain, each of which compromised some facet of her normal functioning, until it was time for her to move into an assisted living facility. She'd been there for several months when a final, fatal hemorrhage killed her. Someone noticed that she hadn't come down to breakfast that morning. The someone, it turned out, was an elderly man we later learned was her new lover, a man she'd known when both of them were much younger. Each had fancied the other but neither one knew...until they found themselves together again in the care facility.
The family was shocked. I was charmed. Mary Pipher, the noted psychologist and author of the book, Another Country, says something powerful in the Times story: "Young love," she is quoted as saying, "is about wanting to be happy; old love is about wanting someone else to be happy." In short, it is about giving rather than receiving. In my novel, The Long Walk Home, middle-aged Alec loves middle-aged and married Fiona so much he leaves her, knowing that--though she does not love her invalid husband--staying can only hurt her. That is, to my mind, the ultimate in "giving rather than receiving." And their love was far more than simply companionable; it was passionate.
So, Why a love story about mature people?
Because we never give up hope.
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