Forget beige – meet the women who are ageing with attitude

Angela Neustatter, author of The Year I Turn ... – one of a slew of books for older women who won’t ‘age gracefully’. Photograph: Olly Hoeben

Apart from a few "frumpy years" in her 50s, when she lost confidence in her right to wear leopardskin tights, author Angela Neustatter says she has never let age define her.

Now she wants her latest book to be a call to arms to young as well as older women to fight back against the "invisibility" that is said to descend once they pass the first flush of youth.

The Year I Turn … is just one of a slew of books and films coming out that suggests Neustatter is among a growing band of women who refuse to go quietly into middle age and beyond.

A trend that began with Lynne Segal's Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing will be joined by In Your Prime: How to Age Disgracefully by India Knight, which is due out in June. Why Frenchwomen Don't Get Facelifts came out in January, with its author, Mireille Guiliano, claiming: "Ageing gracefully is an expression I don't like. Ageing with attitude is what I believe in."

Neustatter, who is 70, added: "This invisibility thing is so ridiculous, ludicrous. And conforming to someone's idea of what you should look like or wear at any particular age is patently not logical. A woman should not be restricted to beige because she is 50. Or not listened to because she isn't young.

"We need to have more confidence in having a voice and I do think, from the people I know and meet, that things are starting to change. Women won't be so easily ignored and younger women are playing a part in that, too. The explosion of feminism again among the young, and their interest in what older women have done, is fabulous."

Interest in older women – albeit those who have always refused to be invisible – bodes well for the latest book by Germaine Greer, who at 75 has rediscovered herself as a conservationist, and for 64-year-old Arianna Huffington's Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Wellbeing, Wisdom, and Wonder, which is tipped to be a bestseller, even before its March publication date.

The grey women's pound is being chased in film, too. In an interview with the Guardian last week, actress Kristin Scott Thomas, 53, said the film industry is starting to notice that there is a market for films about older people. Pointing to the fact that, for a start, the whole population is ageing – "so they've got to make something to entertain us" – and that teenagers no longer dominate box-office receipts, she pointed to the success of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel, as well as the return to TV of Birds of a Feather. "I just think there really need to be stories about people who have been through life and are still hopeful."

Even fashion magazines are beginning to regularly feature an older model, or offer style advice for age groups who won't be buying crop-tops this time around, thanks. Designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Donna Karan and Diane von Furstenberg have not allowed themselves to fade away. We've come a long way since Jean Paul Gaultier was still able to "shock" by using grey-haired models on the catwalk, back in the 1980s. Last week's unveiling of an American Apparel underwear campaign featuring 62-year-old Jacky O'Shaughnessy caused very little stir.

"It all comes with the strong caveat, however, that if you are poor, or caring for someone, or suffering from bad health, then none of this will apply," said Neustatter. "I'm aware of that and I am very lucky in that regard. I'm not suggesting for a minute that all is wonderful for everyone, because it is certainly not. But, [there is] a certain group [of older women], who have looked after themselves and think, I will buy those leopardskin tights or wear a shorter skirt, if that's what I am comfortable with.

"I'm not saying 70 is the new 50. Seventy is the new 70. It's very different from being 50 when you're at that stage of 'is that it?' and worrying if you're with the right person or have done enough, but it is also fun.

"There is no reason in the world why you shouldn't be heard. Older women have something to say – and we will say it."

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Fatima Bhutto: 'Pakistan produces women with extraordinary spirit'

Fatima Bhutto, photographed in London by Sophia Evans for the Observer.

The author Fatima Bhutto has had a lifetime of being asked about her surname. She comes from the "cursed" political dynasty in Pakistan: her grandfather, the former president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed in 1979, three years before Fatima was born; her father, the radical politician Murtaza Bhutto, was shot dead by police in 1996; and her aunt, the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, was killed in a bombing in 2007.

Not surprisingly, Fatima has no desire to enter the political arena. "No," she says, "I always wanted to be a writer. I was very lucky to have a father who was a feminist and as a child I was always told I could do what I wanted to do and I loved to write. I'm doing my dream job! There's no way I'd surrender it."

At 31, Bhutto has just published her first novel. The Shadow of the Crescent Moon is set over the course of one morning in a small town in Pakistan's tribal regions, close to the border with Afghanistan. It follows the story of three brothers who are forced to make difficult choices against a backdrop of continuous war. But the heart of the novel, for Bhutto, lies in the female characters.

"In my mind, it was this story of three brothers and then these women took over, just like Pakistani women do," she laughs. "There is such a singular view of Pakistani women and it's such a shallow and very unfair view. There's an impression of how differently we do things, how downtrodden we are. Millions of women suffer but they [also] struggle, they resist and fight. It's a harsh country, an unfair country, but it also produces women with extraordinary spirit."

In fact, it produces women such as Bhutto herself, who lost her father when she was 14. She was convinced that her aunt, who had fallen out with Murtaza and was prime minister at the time, was responsible. Bhutto wrote about Pakistani state-sanctioned violence in her memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword, which was published in 2010 and became a bestseller in her home country.

When I ask how she feels about her aunt's legacy now, she politely declines to expand. "The nice thing about doing fiction is that I don't feel I have to answer all these heavy political questions."

Could Benazir have done more to empower ordinary women when she was in power? "The only safety that women have in this country is with each other," Bhutto replies. "They've never had it from power."

At one point in her novel, Bhutto writes of a character feeling trapped by "the ghosts of history". Does she feel the same? "I don't think it's just me," she says. "This is a very young country – only 67 years old. With any country negotiating the future against a very turbulent past, you can't escape your heritage. Those ghosts of history are everywhere."

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Weekend book picks: 'How It Ends,' 'City of Women'

What should you read this weekend? USA TODAY's picks for book lovers go international, with a touching love story set in Ireland, and a compelling historical novel about World War II Berlin, a "city of women."

This Is How It Ends
By Kathleen MacMahon; Grand Central, 346 pp., $24.99; fiction

Craving a novel about family ties and romance? This summer serves up This Is How It Ends.

Irish writer Kathleen MacMahon's debut novel takes place in Ireland in 2008 in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election. It centers on Bruno Boylan, a middle-aged American who, on his first trip to his father's homeland, falls in love with Ireland and Addie Murphy. She's a bit of a loner, caring for her dad and doting on her sister's young children.

They give each other a go and though a future together seems tenuous — Bruno is waiting to go back to the U.S. if and only if Obama is elected — their love seems life-changing and then is tested by tragedy.

USA TODAY says *** out of four. "Readers mourning the loss of Irish author Maeve Binchy may find a new friend in MacMahon, who delivers a similar sort of family drama well suited to drowsy afternoons and a cup of tea with a packet of tissues nearby."

City of Women
By David R. Gillham; Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, 392 pp., $25.95; fiction

City of Women is the story of Sigrid Schröder, a (fictional) stenographer in 1943 Berlin whose husband is off on the front lines. She has a secret in her recent past, an affair with a Jewish man. When she has the opportunity to help a resistance group, we know before she does that she will take it.

USA TODAY says *** out of four. "The author's impeccable research, realism and tenderness … make fiction seem like a viable tool for reminding ourselves of history as it truly happened."

The Great Escape
By Susan Elizabeth Phillips; William Morrow, 420 pp., $25.99; fiction

Presidential first daughter turned runaway bride Lucy Jorik leaves her groom at the altar. A sullen biker and a small island in Lake Michigan help her heal.

USA TODAY says **** out of four. "Phillips' novels — funny, sweet, insightful — set the gold standard in contemporary romance."

On the Island
By Tracey Garvis Graves; Plume, $15, 328 pp., paperback original; fiction

A 30-year-old teacher and her 16-year-old student are stranded on a deserted Maldives island for 3½ years. Not as icky as it sounds.

USA TODAY says *** out of four. "From shark attacks to sex scenes, On the Island defines guilty pleasure."

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
By Rachel Joyce; Random House, 325 pp., $25; fiction

When a woman he had once known but not seen in 20 years writes to say she's dying of cancer, Harold Fry takes his inadequate response to the nearest mail box. Rather than mailing it, he keeps walking — from one end of England to the other, for 87 days and 627 miles.

USA TODAY says **** out of four. A "remarkable debut novel … a gentle adventure with an emotional wallop."

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‘Women From the Ankle Down’ has a lot of sole

They're perhaps the most dissected element of a woman's wardrobe — shoes, the anchor of an outfit and the soul of Rachelle Bergstein's mostly lively look at the history of stilettos, sneakers and sundry other leather- and rubber-soled objects of swoon.

To be sure, a rhapsody of shoes is well-trod bookshelf terrain — indeed, Bergstein cobbles together some of her Ferragamo-to-Louboutin timeline from other shoe-centric tomes. But Women From the Ankle Down freshens up the genre with its chatty yet authoritative tone. (Bergstein, a 2003 English lit grad from Vassar, stumbles when she gets too term-paper thinky on a subject that — let's face it — is more unbuttoned that laced up.)

Trotted out chronologically are tales tracing Salvatore Ferragamo's humble beginnings in an Italian village and his emergence as Hollywood's sultan of stilettos. Lana Turner's white, open-toed pumps in The Postman Always Rings Twice? Those were his. And though Marilyn Monroe's white halter dress always nabs top fashion billing when it comes to The Seven Year Itch, Bergstein rightly pays tribute to the matching size 7AA strappy Ferragamo sandals that teeter over the iconic subway grate.

There are ripping yarns tied to other A-list leather-and-sequin creations: Judy Garland's (multiple pairs of) ruby slippers, Nancy Sinatra's go-go boots that were made for walkin'. (Bergstein, in an unfortunately rare bout of primary reporting, chatted up Sinatra, though that interview seems to have yielded little sizzle.) And the title notwithstanding, Bergstein fetes the famous footwear of a few men, including John Travolta and his Saturday Night Fever Cuban-heeled loafers — another instance of a significant celluloid shoe getting upstaged by an outfit (Travolta's white suit).

Of course, no contemporary recounting of shoes would be complete without a discussion of how Sex and the City made Manolo Blahnik a household name and cemented the idea of luxury, triple-figure footwear stashed in even upper-middle-class closets. But Bergstein spends too much time rehashing the pricey-pump-as-girl-power argument familiar to even casual consumers of recent pop culture. She has more fun rummaging through the Depression-, postwar- and disco-era wardrobes of women past.

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'Mad Men' and women write real-life books about that era

It's been a mad, mad, mad, mad, maddeningly long wait for new episodes of AMC's Mad Men.

And as we count down to the premiere of Season 5 on March 25, fans of Don Draper, Roger Sterling and Peggy Olson can immerse themselves in Madison Avenue and the '60s lifestyle by dipping into a groaning cocktail cart of new books.

Among them: Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the '60s and Beyond (Thomas Dunne Books, $24.99), written by Jane Maas, dubbed the "real-life Peggy Olson" by Ad Age magazine.

Like the fictional Olson, Maas, 80, began working as a copywriter on Madison Avenue in the 1960s. Her memoir and her workplace recollections indicate "there's a lot of stuff Mad Men gets absolutely right," Maas tells USA TODAY, including:

The three-martini lunch. "Absolutely true, although women did not in fact go out for three-martini lunches as often as men did. Women tended to brown-bag it a lot more. It was more work ethic and calorie control."

The sex. "Part of it was because of all the drinking. If you happened upon someone in the stairwell kissing an account executive, and you knew both of them were married to other people, you just averted your eyes and walked on."

The fashion. "There were no pantyhose then — it hadn't been invented yet — so we had stockings with seams you had to keep checking on. We had little garter belts, and over that, we wore little panties and these bras that turned your breasts into javelins."

Real-life Don Drapers. "The creative director who sexually harassed me for two years and pursued me relentlessly was incredibly handsome, very dashing and he knew it. Like Don Draper, he considered himself a great Lothario."

For a more straightforward history, there's The Real Mad Men: The Renegades of Madison Avenue and the Golden Age of Advertising (Running Press, $28) by British adman Andrew Cracknell, who says Mad Men is "spot on."

"I've viewed some episodes of Mad Men three times, and believe me, that's not a chore. It's extraordinarily good, and I think, from all the research I did, it's pretty accurate."

From the cocktail cart

If your interest is purely gustatory:

•How to Drink Like a Mad Man by Ralph Maloney (Dover, $9.95, April 19). Retitled reprint of the 1962 humor book The 24-Hour Drink Book: A Guide to Executive Survival.

•The Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Sixties Cookbook: More Than 100 Retro Recipes for the Modern Cook by Rick Rodgers and Heather Maclean (Running Press, $20, April 24). Betty Draper would approve of recipes for Waldorf Salad and Onion Dip.

•The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook: Inside the Kitchens, Bars, and Restaurants of Mad Men by Judy Gelman and Peter Zheutlin (Smart Pop Books, $16.95). Prepare Oysters Rockefeller and a martini good enough for Roger Sterling.

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Kristin Hannah knows what women want in fiction

BETHESDA, Md. – With her best-selling novels about strong women facing down whatever life throws at them, Kristin Hannah makes her fans cry. And they love her for it.

Toby Jorrin, for USA TODAY

Kristin Hannah's new novel, 'Home Front,' follows an Army helicopter pilot who must consider her duties to her family when she is deployed to Iraq.

Toby Jorrin, for USA TODAY

Kristin Hannah's new novel, 'Home Front,' follows an Army helicopter pilot who must consider her duties to her family when she is deployed to Iraq.

"Her writing literally makes me bawl," says Christy Enchelmaier, 29, a first-grade teacher in suburban Maryland. Hannah is one of Enchelmaier's favorite authors because "she doesn't sugarcoat things; she's very realistic."

On a recent frosty night in this Washington suburb, Hannah, 51, draws a crowd of nearly 100 like-minded women, hungry for the novelist's dramatic, issue-driven fiction, to a Barnes & Noble. It's the same female readership that has made Jodi Picoult a publishing superstar. Though there was the occasional husband in the audience, the crowd was overwhelmingly female and fanatic about Hannah, the author of 19 novels.

In her latest, Home Front (St. Martin's Press, $27.99), Hannah offers a heart-wrenching tale about a female Army helicopter pilot deployed to Iraq. The heroine, Jolene, is torn between her duty as a soldier and her obligations to her husband and their two young daughters.

Home Front made its debut last week at No. 7 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list, the first time Hannah has cracked the top 10. (This week, the novel drops to No. 25. Hannah's last novel, Night Road, about teen drinking and a tragic car accident, reached No. 13 on USA TODAY's list.)

Mother is always right

During her 2½-hour presentation and book signing, Hannah alternately charmed, amused and moved her audience. She made them laugh when she described how she didn't change a word in the first draft of the first novel she attempted. In one of the many rejection letters she received, one editor wrote Hannah, "You may have talent, but frankly, I can't tell."

She answered questions about how she writes: longhand on a yellow legal pad, often sitting in a lawn chair near the water. (She and her husband split their time between an island near Seattle and Hawaii.)

She also described how her decision to write fiction emerged from tragedy.

When she was 25, she was spending her days in law school and her nights in a Seattle hospital where her mother, then 46, was dying of breast cancer. To pass the hours, they decided to collaborate on a romance novel — a genre her mother adored.

The story, set in 18th-century Scotland, was just awful, Hannah says. But what she saw as a distraction for a dying woman, her mother saw as a vocation for her daughter. "She said I would become a writer."

After her mother's death, Hannah put the unfinished novel away. Two years later, it was Hannah's husband who suggested she make another attempt at writing fiction.

By then an attorney in Seattle, Hannah was put on bed rest for five months while she was pregnant.

Her growing fixation on daytime TV shows such as The Price Is Right made her husband desperate, Hannah says. After her son was born, Hannah knew two things: "I wanted to be a stay-at-home mother, and I needed to write." (Today, their grown son works in Hollywood.)

Hannah eventually did publish a historical romance novel in 1991, A Handful of Heaven, set in the Yukon Territory in the 19th century.

But she says she truly found her creative footing once she moved into contemporary women's fiction with 1999's On Mystic Lake. Her best-selling novels include Firefly Lane, which revolves around two best friends, and Winter Garden, about a Russian woman who hides her painful past from her daughters.

'Much more patriotic' now

Later, over dinner, Hannah expands on why she told the audience earlier that Home Front changed her more than any other book. "I was woefully uninformed about the daily sacrifices people in the military make," she says. Spending time with a female Army helicopter pilot in Washington state left her "much more patriotic."

But while it explores hot-button topics such as mothers in combat and post-traumatic stress disorder, the novel puts its real focus on the heroine and the emotional bonds she makes and breaks — as a daughter, a wife, a mother, a friend and a soldier.

Says Hannah, "I'm endlessly fascinated by the relationships that define us."

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A TRAIN IN WINTER: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France

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Washington Post book reviewers

Nov 25, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Caroline Moorehead
Harper
ISBN 978-0061650703
374 pages
$27.99

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

On the morning of Jan. 24, 1943, German soldiers and French policemen herded 230 women aboard a train bound for a destination about which these passengers knew nothing. About half of them were communists who in one way or another had aided - or been charged with aiding - the French Resistance. "The majority," Carolina Moorehead writes, "came from every part and region of France, from Paris, Bordeaux, Brittany, Normandy, Aquitaine and along the banks of the Loire. They had sheltered resisters, written and copied out anti-German pamphlets, hidden weapons in shopping bags, helped carry out acts of sabotage." Among them were a doctor, a dentist, four chemists, "farmers, shopkeepers, women who had worked in factories and in the post office, teachers, and secretaries," as well as dressmakers, students and housewives.

When the train finally stopped, after a cold and singularly unpleasant journey, the women found themselves in "a vast white snowy landscape, deserted, flat and frozen." They were marched across this landscape, under a sign that read Arbeit Macht Frei and into an immense camp. "Had they heard the words Auschwitz or Birkenau, they would have meant nothing to them." They stayed there for two years, until the end of the war. Forty-nine of them survived, and, given the unspeakable conditions into which they were thrust, it is a miracle that this many made it out to freedom. They made it because they had developed formidable survival skills and for two overriding reasons: "They had lived because each of them had been incredibly lucky, and because of the friendship between them, which had protected them and made it easier to withstand the barbarity."

Their story, as Moorehead tells it in this compelling and moving book, is more of survival than of triumph. Some of them managed to return to lives that suggested normality - marriage or remarriage, children, high honors from the French government and others - and incredibly four of them were still alive as "A Train in Winter" went to press, but virtually all of them were haunted by memories of what they had undergone, in particular by memories of the friends who had perished in Heinrich Himmler's hell on earth, and some of them by recurrent dreams that made the Holocaust a living presence in their lives.

Moorehead obviously likes and admires these women, especially those who lived long enough to talk to her about their experiences before, during and after the death camp, but she does not romanticize them; they are real people, with shortcomings as well as strengths, and some of them are so fully portrayed as to become vivid presences. Moorehead has a soft spot for the French communists - they were "resilient, energetic and prepared to sacrifice themselves," and "it was no accident that all but a few of the survivors had been active politically, committed to shared beliefs in a better future, and accustomed to hardship and discipline" - but she indulges this only a few times, and it does not seriously affect her narrative. What matters is that she is generally as tough-minded as were the women themselves, sparing the reader little in describing the cruelties in France during the Occupation (many of them inflicted by the French themselves) and the far greater ones of Auschwitz and Birkenau.

The first half of "A Train in Winter" is necessarily taken up with setting the scene in France as the women became variously involved with the Resistance in its early stages and as the Nazi grip on their country grew ever tighter and, in its brutality, ever more capricious. French collaboration was widespread, especially among the police, who were seduced with improved pay and other privileges; eventually their Special Brigades pursued with "sophistication and tenacity" those whom the Nazis considered undesirable - the list, of course, was long and inclusive. Eagerly abetted by the French police, the Nazis conducted "mass reprisals" for the killings of German soldiers and officials, usually murdering 10 French hostages for every German victim. The slaughter of 27 Frenchmen at Chateaubriand in October 1941 was only one among many, "but the name Chateaubriand would enter the consciousness not only of the French, but of the Allies, as a symbol of German brutality."

The women began to be imprisoned at Romainville in Paris in August 1942 in difficult but manageable conditions. The result can scarcely have been planned by the Nazis: "All across the women's section, in the dormitories, on the staircase, in the courtyard ... friendships were born and grew, women separated by age, schooling, class and profession drawn into patterns of affection and understanding by shared stories and similar losses. Grieving for their executed husbands, missing their children, fearful for their families, they talked, for there was not much else to do; and, as they talked, they felt stronger and better able to cope." Indeed, by the time they had been installed in Birkenau, "friendship between the French women had, if possible, grown stronger," and it continued to strengthen right up to the end. Of course, there were differences and even rare spats, but these friendships were essential to the women's lives.

Birkenau "had, since the late spring of 1942, been the main women's camp in the Auschwitz complex," but though the prisoners were separated by sex, they were subjected to the same agonies. Before being taken to the camp, one of the women wrote, "Some days I think that I have reached the limits of horror," but she could not have imagined Birkenau. A prisoner named Simone Alizon, one of the survivors, could not forget one Sunday there:

"She was standing in a line of Polish women when a lorry with SS men stopped close by. One leant out and indicated that a number of the women were to fall out. One of these was a mother with twin girls of about eight or nine. She clung to them, but was yanked away and pushed on to the lorry, which then drove off. The little girls, left standing on their own, were crying. Simone took one by each hand and when the whistle blew to return to the barracks, she began to lead them away, singing to them. But then two SS women appeared, unleashed their dogs and gave an order in German. The dogs leapt on the girls and seized them by the throat. Simone stood paralysed. When the dogs were ordered to let go, the girls were dead, their faces savaged beyond recognition."

That Simone "did not say a single word" to anyone for days after this inexpressible horror can scarcely come as a surprise, yet she somehow survived it and the camp, "married and had two daughters and was awarded the Lgion d'honneur," and lives to this day; she was "the youngest of the survivors" and is now in her late 80s. This the reader can learn in an appendix in which Moorehead describes, as best the evidence permits, the fates of all these women. Readers will find themselves, as I did, turning to this appendix over and over again while reading the text.

The literature of wartime France and the Holocaust is by now so vast as to confound the imagination, but when a book as good as this comes along we are reminded that there is always room for something new. As the paragraph just quoted makes plain, reading "A Train in Winter" can be hard indeed, but it is a necessary book.

Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at)washpost.com.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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