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A VIKING ONLINE READERS GUIDE TO
THAT CERTAIN AGE
Elizabeth Buchan |
An Introduction to
That Certain Age |
With Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman and The Good Wife Strikes Back, Elizabeth Buchan captivated millions of readers with her wit, warmth, and honesty. Now, in her compulsive new novel, That Certain Age , Buchan is at the peak of her skill as she tackles the big question—what do women want?
With lively prose and a keen eye for detail, Buchan writes of the parallel lives of two married, middle-aged women, Siena Grant and Barbara Beeching—women living forty years apart yet sharing similar concerns of love, loyalty, and independence. Casting a shadow over the safe familiarity of their respective lives, a decision looms; how each woman makes that choice demonstrates the many ways women’s lives have changed over the course of a generation—as well as the ways they’ve stayed the same.
For Barbara, it is a question of temptation. A satisfied housewife with two grown children, a husband who is a pilot, and a talent for bridge, Barbara’s life is stable to the point of routine. But when she meets Alexander Liberty, a dashing young student with whom she tumbles into an exciting affair, she begins to see herself in a whole new light. Torn between her love for her husband Ryder and her passion for Alexander, Barbara finds herself faced with a choice that could haunt her for the rest of her life.
Forty years later, Siena is also struggling with commitment, juggling a successful career as a fashion consultant with marriage to her second husband, Charlie. He wants children, she isn’t so sure, and neither of them is getting any younger. With his biological clock ticking and their busy schedules conflicting, Siena can see that she’s going to have to make a decision, and soon: she can take the leap into parenthood with Charlie or choose her career and possibly lose her marriage.
Illustrating the fact that answers don’t always come easily—in fiction or in life—Buchan is a wise and witty guide in exploring issues of happiness, desire, marriage, and parenthood. She understands that getting what one wishes can be as confusing and risky as not knowing what one wants. Those who have enjoyed her other novels will find Buchan doing what she does best in That Certain Age . Those who are discovering her for the first time will find a dynamic, and soon-to-be-favorite, voice.
Questions for Discussion
1.Buchan begins the book with an epigraph by George Eliot, a woman who flaunted social conventions and wrote novels under a male pseudonym. Why do you think she chose this author, and this particular passage to introduce the book?
2. Both Siena and Barbara challenge traditional ideas of femininity regarding maternal instincts and fidelity. What are some conventions of gender or age that have constricted you and how have you reacted to them? What is your definition of a successful woman?
3. How do the minor characters (Bunty, Manda, etc.) play into the struggles of Barbara and Siena? Which aspects of womanhood do these women represent? How are female friendships represented in the book?
4. What is your opinion of Barbara’s affair? Would your opinion change if the affair had been with a man her age? What if it had been Ryder who had the affair instead of Barbara?
5. In not wanting to have or discuss having children, is Siena being fair to Charlie? How do you feel the men are treated in the novel? Are there any similarities between Charlie and Ryder?
6. Both Barbara and Siena are searching for their own happiness. Is it possible to be completely happy? Did Siena and Barbara achieve happiness?
7. Barbara says “I think women should run nations” (p. 43). Discuss how you think the world would be different, in both positive and negative ways, if women were in charge.
8. “Inside that body, the older Alexander was beginning to emerge,” says Barbara (p. 306). How are you different from who you were five, ten, or twenty years ago? Is it true that we become predictable with age?
9. How do you imagine Siena’s life after the book ends? Does she have children? A career? Describe Barbara’s life between her last chapter and the end of the book.
10. The saying “be careful what you wish for” might apply to this novel. In what ways do the women get what they want and what are the results? Is there anything that you’re wishing for? What would be the risks involved if you achieved those desires?
A Conversation with Elizabeth Buchan
Set in 1959 and the early twenty-first century, That Certain Age alternates between the first person dialogues of Barbara Beeching and Siena Grant, respectively. Why did you decide to use first person narratives to tell their stories? What led you to choose this structure for the novel?
The first-person narrative presents an interesting mixture of problems and wonderful freedoms. Obviously, it is restricting and you have to think hard about how to dramatize situations and plot devices which are crucial but might be out of the narrator’s reach. Yet, that sacrifice is more than made up for in its unrivalled ability to allow the author to take over the interior life of a character. Focusing on two characters at different periods presented me with a potential headache and a risk – could I, the author, engage the reader sufficiently quickly to make that point-counterpoint work? The answer, I concluded, lay in creating an intimacy and depth of character which would kidnap the reader from the first page. Easier said than done! But, if that could be achieved, then the rest would fall into place.
As a writer, what were the differences in inhabiting Siena’s and Barbara’s voices? Do you connect or empathize with one character more than the other? Was it difficult to leave them behind once you were finished writing the book?
Both women were so clear in my mind from the first. Barbara is very much of my mother’s generation and I have just to shut my eyes and I can picture my mother moving around her kitchen, making jam, hoarding bits of string (those who lived through the Second World War and the fifties were very thrifty), organizing her domestic domain as she was born and raised to do. If asked what she wished for, Barbara might well say. ‘I long to know more about the world’ and I sympathize deeply with that hunger to know and to learn. Barbara is not without power in her domestic sphere, but she has no power at all in society. (She has to work undercover – viz, her resort to strategies when she wants to make changes in the home. She cannot pay to take her lover out to dinner.) Siena, who is very knowledgeable about the world (but perhaps less about herself) just walked into my head. I see her everywhere where I live in London. Clever, ambitious, full of doubts at this crucial stage in her life, anxious about her future, she is a contemporary woman who, presented with so many choices (in direct contrast to Barbara), she is almost overwhelmed. She has one huge advantage over Barbara, however, the power base of having her own money to dispose of as she wishes. That, to a greater extent, plus a different mind set, is what gives women their freedom. The reaction to them both has been curious. Lots of readers, younger women in particular, have made a point in saying that they love Barbara. Is there something significant in this response? A nostalgia for the old ways? I don’t know, but I grew very fond of both.
Your novel deals with a number of themes, among them the pursuit of happiness, the constraints of being a woman, the intricacies of marriage and family, and the exploration of self. How have these issues affected your own life? How much of your own experience do you use when writing?
I spent much of my twenties and thirties exhausted by the demands of mothering and working. Frequently, I would ask myself: is this it? Is this the sum of my existence? Of course it wasn’t. As my children grew older, I became aware of a whole dimension to the way I thought about life, and about its possibilities. It was an exciting, sometimes joyous, re-growth and expansion and I have found that is has influenced the way I handle my novels. Men and women do share many things in common, but a woman’s experience is tied in directly to her biology, and I am very conscious of this perspective.
From fashion advice to life in postwar England, your writing is alive with details and information. Could you discuss the amount of research you do before beginning a new project? What was the most interesting thing you learned while preparing for the book?
Research can be a millstone – it is also addictive. I blush when I look at my earlier novels which are crammed with details which I thought the reader should know. (I wrote about the French Revolution in my first novel and I was so determined to cram every fact in that I even included the colour of Danton’s drawing-room chairs!) The secret is: do as much research as you wish, then forget the majority of it. The great novelists teach that less is more. Over the course of nine novels, I have discovered it is the odd, quirky or disconcerting fact that stares up at you from a page or document that becomes an important focus. In That Certain Age, I happened to browsing through a history of the apple, and learnt that an orchard is, of course, a highly artificial construct. That got me thinking about apples in literature and myth and I though it would be interesting to use Barbara and Siena’s encounters with apples and to tie them in to the general point that, in the end, most people wish to engage with the primal forces of love and procreation – the secret roar of life under the surface.
Siena says at one point, “forty is the new thirty.” Do you believe that this is true? Are our standards shifting as milestones such as marriage and parenthood are delayed?
Yes and, what is more, fifty is certainly the new forty. There has never been a better time for middle aged men and women who, health and circumstances permitting, are now encouraged to exploit a slice of their life which our grandparents did not have. Women in particular have nothing to loose but the chains of any domestic drudgery, or even the chains of a career that has gone stale, and everything to gain. They can say ‘goodbye’ to guilt for most of them will have done their childrearing, and they can now say if they wish: ‘I will fashion my life more to suit to me’. Or not, if that suits them. They can look better, feel better and exercise powers that are waiting to be unleashed. Enjoy!
The female friendships in That Certain Age are honest and nuanced; they display a range of emotion covering love, envy, and everything in between. Why do you believe women develop such intense relationships with one another? Is it difficult to convey the complexity of female friendships in writing?
The forging of female friendships is both innate and taught – and how we love to burrow down into the intimacies of our girlfriend’s lives. It is a deeply important resource for take courage and comfort (and exorcise demons) through the exchange of confidences and often through everyday companionship when the children are small. I tell my daughter that friendship has to be worked at, and the rough and tumble of adolescent friendships, which run the gamut from affection and love to irritation and hatred, are the nursery slopes for later, and hopefully successful, relationships which will last a lifetime. I want my friends to be at the important moments of my life, including my funeral. I cannot imagine going out of life without their farewells. These friendships are different from the relationships with partners and children, but are just as important. Conveying friendship in a novel takes me quite a bit of thought – I have to try to make them as honest as I can and avoid sentimentality, and I have to think about them long and hard and construct their part in the plot carefully.
Both Siena and Barbara long for freedom from the domestic expectations placed on women. Do you think that gender roles are somehow ingrained or are they foisted upon us by society? In what ways do you see them changing?
I can’t help feeling some habits engrained in the female DNA. Why else do I (who loathes housework) long to gather blackberries in the autumn and fill my larder with bottled plums? Why else do I insist that my family sits down to meal all together at least once a week? Perhaps women are luckier than many men for they are licensed to employ their instinct to nourish and nurture, whereas men have had to direct their energies away from the home. Yet, change is happening, even if it slow and there are still far too many desperate housewives. Yet, what is cheering that these changes will not only work in the interests of women - who will in the future have more flexible options - but also give men back a latitude of freedom and house husbands will not be a derided species.
The middle-aged woman is poorly served in film and books. Why do you think that is? How do you feel about most depictions of women “of a certain age”? Do you think attitudes are changing?
I hope every women is demanding that attitudes should change – and men should be there too (a contented and active middle slice of society is in everybody’s interests.) When I wrote Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman many people advised me that the title would put the novel at a disadvantage. Fortunately, it provided to be quite the opposite which I think goes part of way to answering the question. However, the cruelty of societies which marginalize the middle-aged woman (particularly if they are widows) still hangs in the air – plus insidious media and advertising attitudes which always emphasis youth. But I have a feeling this will be the age of the middle-aged woman. Strong, independent and looking better than ever, she is on the march and on the move.
Both Siena and Barbara are seeking happiness, trying to understand what they need and how to achieve it. What is your idea of happiness?
My personal happiness has been to have my family but also to have my creative life. It took me until my late thirties before anything began to happen. Instinctively I knew that I would have to bide my time, gathering confidence and knowledge, before I could take flight. But that waiting has been worth it, and both family and writing have given me pleasure and richness beyond words. |
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