I keep forgetting to introduce my books to you! Let me remedy this.
This week, someone (a very generous someone) posted about The Year of the Fruit Cake. They said lovely things about it and about my writing. While I ought to simply share the post, or at least repeat the words, this week I am terribly, terribly Australian. Just saying that someone said nice things is blowing my own trumpet in Oz. Tall poppy syndrome is one of our big cultural babies and so I cannot repeat things without feeling as if I need to be cut down. This is, of course, a really bad way of letting you know about my book.
The Year of the Fruit Cake won me a nice trophy and mentions in many places. I will never understand this, because it’s not that easy to read. It’s at the literary end of SF. I wanted to write about a difficult set of subjects (including perimenopause) and I wanted to do it with science fiction and I used so many of the things women experience at that time of life in Australia to shape the novel. Not just as the subjects dealt with in the novel, but in the storytelling itself.
When I went through perimenopause my body was unreliable, so the narrators are unreliable. Everything is personal.
My memory had blips, so my main character has major memory issues.
So many friendships had to be renegotiated, especially those with men and with younger women, who mostly had not idea of the magnitude of the changes and that hot flushes were not just an excuse to wield a pretty fan. Our society lacks story that explains these changes, so I turned one of my perimenoapusal women into an alien.
Eventually I discovered that one of the issues I and my cohort faced was gentle shifts along gender spectra. OK, not so gentle. Now I’m past it, my body doesn’t want to declare how very female it is one minute and that it’s increasing in testosterone the next. I have settled into being female, but not into being female in the same way I once was. The aliens in the novel with their twelve genders are closer to my physical reality than I like to admit. I gave them at least one shift that was delightful. I wish I could do the same for human women. Perimenopause was a nightmare for me, so I made those physical changes a nightmare for my alien-in-human-body.
Also, I wanted to write about othering. Australia is not good to older women, so I wrote about the process of becoming an older woman and having to find new ways of living in society. I had no idea the same thing (in a more extreme version) would apply to me right now as an Australian Jew. I had no idea that this year I would live in a year of Fruit Cake, with an uncertain future and a society I thought was stable turned chancy.
I entirely thought chocolate would remain important and I was totally correct about that, thankfully.
The novel is a slow read and I will never write one as difficult again… but I got some things far too right. I’m glad that one of them was chocolate.
I loved that book.
I’m so glad. I wrote it for women over 50. There are not nearly enough books about women over 50 for women over 50.
Some one near and dear to me is allergic to chocolate. I think that’s one of the saddest things.
Strangely enough, I never experienced a hot flash until after I hit menopause. I was laughing up until that point, and as punishment, have been cursed with them ever since.
It is. Allergies can be frightening. When anyone explains how perfect gefilte fish is and encourages me to just try it because anything is worth trying once, I have been known to ask them if they’ll deal with the inevitable outcome from death (by fish) to funeral. I know this is unkind of me, but it stops them saying, “Just a piece.”
My husband, who is deathly allergic to nuts (but not peanuts) has, several times, been given cookies with nuts in them by people who thought it was all in his head. Same thing with my elder daughter, who inherited the allergy.* I cannot fathom why anyone would push a friend, or even a stranger, to eat something that might make them ill, or kill them.
*As a two year old, one of the kid’s earliest full sentences was “Does it have nuts?” Shortly followed by “Peanuts are not nuts. Peanuts are legumes.” I had to do battle on her behalf with a preschool teacher who didn’t trust the word of a three-year-old (and rightly so, but the kid felt aggrieved when she was not allowed a peanut butter cookie.
I’m anther who can be killed by taking a bite of certain foods. I can eat a whole peanut without dying, but if a brazil nut is sitting on top of a cake and I eat some of that cake, I will go into anaphylactic shock. This is why I said that allergies can be frightning.