It’s Never Too Late to Be a Mid-Life Badass
I’ve wanted to be a novelist for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I ripped through every Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew I could get my hands on, and when I ran out of those, I moved on to my brother’s Hardy Boys collection. Then I got older and discovered that boys themselves were a kind of mystery in need of solving, so naturally I progressed to Judy Blume!
I can still remember it like it was yesterday. Every summer, my mom took my brother, sister, and me to TurnStyle once a week and let each of us pick out two books. The expectation was that these books would last seven days. Mine lasted two. So, the remaining five days were spent writing stories of my own while waiting for next week to get here.
When I got to college and started taking creative writing classes, I made the unsettling discovery that years of gold stars did not automatically translate into A’s. I still got respectable grades, but it was the first time it occurred to me that loving to write and being good writer were not necessarily the same thing. There were no gold stars passed out for passion.
Paris Happened!
Then Paris happened.
I spent a semester there at the American University, and I knew almost immediately that I was where I belonged when I stepped onto my first cobblestone street in Montmartre and was nearly mowed down by two flics chasing what I can only describe as a hot French bad guy down the Rue de l’Abreuvoir. The two-tone siren of the police car ricocheted off the stone walls, and the whole thing felt like a scene from a movie.
Not a serious movie. A movie where the cute young American co-ed winds up on the back of the hot French bad guy’s motorcycle, zipping through the centuries-old streets of Paris—darting in between cars like they’re in a James Bond film—and in the end, lives happily ever after.
That’s when I decided I wanted to write a lighthearted crime novel set in Paris.
Years later, I finally sat down to write one.
Or rather, several.
Finishing them was another matter.
A Lot of First Chapters
For years I wrote a lot of first chapters and even some half-finished manuscripts. But there was always something else brewing that I couldn’t wait to start. Yet every story filed away under “Another Story for Another Day” was followed by the familiar chorus from childhood:
“Lauren, you always start things but never finish them.”
The funny thing is, eventually I stopped seeing that as a defect of character. Part of having ADHD is understanding that your brain doesn’t always cooperate with conventional wisdom. So I honored that part of me and stopped forcing myself to finish stories I no longer cared about simply because the other people in my life were hung up on the whole completion thing. Life is too short to spend six months writing Chapter Eighteen when your heart is already on Chapter One somewhere else.
Life Happened!
Then life happened.
Not the overwhelming kind of life with needy husbands and screamy kids. The scary kind.
Somewhere along the way, the confidence I had as a kid quietly slipped out the back door when I wasn’t looking. It somehow returned in my forties but then disappeared again. And soon I found myself confronting a thought I never expected:
Maybe I’m too old.
Then I heard Barack Obama mention that Julia Child didn’t publish her first book until she was nearly fifty.
I remember thinking, Well, that’s good news. I still have time.
Then fifty came and went.
And I had nothing to show for it.
Fortunately, Bonnie Garmus showed up on the scene and made me see that I hadn’t missed the starting gun. In fact, I wasn’t even late to the race.
When she published Lessons in Chemistry at sixty-four, something shifted for me. Suddenly, I realized I wasn’t running out of time after all. I had plenty of it. Maybe not all the time in the world, but enough. More than enough.
Oddly, giving up the deadline was the thing that finally allowed me to finish.
The result was The Soufflé Also Rises.
The Soufflé Also Rises
What surprised me wasn’t that I finished my book. It was what happened afterward.
Once I stopped seeing age as some looming deadline, I stopped seeing it as a limitation. Not only did this shift allow me to finish my book, but it allowed me to live. Not that I was dying or anything that cinematic, but the idea that women somehow expire after fifty—a concept I would very much like to discuss with the man who invented it—began to seem ridiculous.
I felt lighter.
I had more energy.
The involuntary middle-aged groan that happens when you get up from a chair all but disappeared (I take exception with traditional toilet seats).
I started saying “f**k it” to things that used to occupy entirely too much space in my brain.
And one day I noticed that my wrinkles had vanished.
Not literally, of course. They’re still there.
But they disappeared in the only eyes that matter: my own.
(c) Lauren Johnson
About The Soufflé Also Rises by Lauren Johnson:
It’s 2008 and Lizi just can’t catch a break.
On the heels of a nasty divorce and a paltry settlement agreement – barely enough to reload her Starbucks card – Lizi is laid off from her job during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Flat broke, Lizi takes a job at Whole Foods where she meets Frankie, a twenty-seven-year-old artist half her age whose overly simplistic worldview is exactly what Lizi needs to get on with her life.
But after an unfortunate incident involving her ex-husband, his pregnant girlfriend, and a carton of cage-free eggs, Lizi finds herself, once again, out of a job. So what does a fifty-four-year-old woman with no money, no job, and no prospects do? She sells all her possessions and goes to Paris in search of her long-lost dream: to write her first novel.
But when the airline loses her luggage and offers her a meal voucher for the famed Hotel Jolie, Lizi pounces on the opportunity while unwittingly setting off a chain of events which land her at the centre of the notorious Harry Winston jewel heist. And when her young partner-in-crime joins her in Paris, the two must outrun the Serbian mafia while trying not to trip over the dead bodies left in their wake.
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