Dear Friend,

I’m sorry it’s been so long since I last sent you an update!  

Many of you have followed me since I first started my blog – Mummy was a Secret Drinker, back in 2015. I can’t believe how fast the time has gone, since those bleak days of taking it one day at a time.

Back then, I was 46 years old, with three young kids. Now I’m 55. My eldest child has left home for University and I’m having lots of fun with the menopause. The only time I’m ever described as ‘hot’ these days is when I’m having a hormonal flush. 

The strange thing about reaching your fifties is that, although your outsides might be gradually falling apart, on the inside you don’t feel any different from the way you did in your twenties. I still don’t feel like a ‘proper adult’, and I don’t expect that I will at seventy either. 

I look at my parents, in their eighties, and their friends, and they are all surfing the internet and travelling the world. They’re nothing like the helpless, harmless, older people who I encounter in novels.  It often feels like the only role of a pensioner in fiction is that of a sad, lonely, hopeless technophobe, adrift in modern society, who is then saved by the kindness of a younger person.

Well, bollocks to that. That’s not the kind of senior I intend to be, nor the one I want to read about. So, I decided to write a novel featuring older characters who are bossing it. Pensioners who are showing the younger generation how to navigate life, rather than vice versa.

This doesn’t mean they’re perfect, or even aspirational. There’s nothing more boring than a character without flaws. By the time you reach your eighth decade, you’re bound to have collected many bad habits along the way, and to have a fair few secrets and regrets in your past. And my characters certainly do!

I loved the idea of older people who refuse to age gracefully, or to play by the rules. And I had a vision of a minibus, the kind that you see every day taking groups of kids or old people on day trips, being pulled over on the motorway. I imagined a policewoman looking for one particular escaped felon, but everyone on that bus offloading their guilty consciences and confessing to some heinous misdemeanour.

That scene became the prologue to my new novel – HOW TO AGE DISGRACEFULLY. I then spent the next year having a great deal of fun working out who these passengers were, and what they’d all been up to! I hope you have as much fun reading it, and I hope that you’ll never look at a septuagenarian in quite the same way again

Pre-orders are really, really important for the success of a novel, so if you’d like to read the new book, I’d be hugely grateful if you could pre-order from your favourite bookshop. Thank you, thank you.

The book is out in the USA on June 11th, and you can pre-order HERE, and in the UK on June 20th, and you can find it HERE.

If you pre-order in the UK, you have the chance to win a year’s supply of Freddie’s Flowers! Details HERE. 

I’m doing a few events around the UK over the next few weeks, and I’d love to meet you! I’ll be in Tunbridge Wells on May 11th, Leeds on 19th June and Tring on June 20th. To purchase tickets please click on Upcoming Events below. There will be more dates to follow, which I’ll announce on my Instagram, Twitter (I still can’t call it X) and Facebook.

I hope you all have a wonderful summer, when it finally arrives! 

With love, 

Clare Pooley