No! I Don't Want to Join a Bookclub

by Virginia Ironside

"Certainly not!" said Marie Sharp, when a friend suggests she join a bookclub when she turns sixty.

"Bookclub people always seem to have to wade through Captain Corelli's Mandolin or, groan, The God of Small Things. They feel they've forever got to poke their brain with a pointed stick to keep it working. But either you've got a lively brain or you haven't. And anyway, I don't want to be young and stimulated any more. Those oldies who spend their lives bicycling across Mongolia at eighty and para-gliding at ninety, aren't brilliant specimens of old age. No, they're just tragic failures who haven't come to terms with aging. I want to start doing old things, not young things."

Too young to get whisked away by a Stannah Stairlift, or to enjoy the luxury of a Walk-In Bath (but not so much that she doesn't enjoy comfortable shoes), Marie, is all the same, getting on in years - and she's thrilled about it! She's a bit pre-occupied about whether to give up sex - "Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!" - but there are compensations, like falling in love all over again - but this time with her baby grandson, Gene.

Curmudgeonly, acute, and funny, this fictionalised diary is what happens when grumpy old women meet Bridget Jones.

• ISBN10: 0670916242
• ISBN13: 9780670916245
• Publish Date: 28 September 2006
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 9 December 2007
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Imprint: Fig Tree
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 256
• Language: English

Reviews

[MurderByDeath]

If I'm let loose in one of those "as many books as will fill this box for $5" sales, this book is bound to happen.  Bought for title and the cover with only a cursory glance at the summary, I am not this books target market.   A diary-turned-memoir this is a book specifically aimed at post-menopausal, over 60 women who are also mothers; if the reader is also single, so much the better.  As I'm only 1 of those things my ability to identify with Ironside is rather limited.   Still, eventually I'm going to be all those things except a mother, and sooner than I consider ideal, so it was compelling enough to keep me reading.  Ironside starts out really rather unlikeable; at one point early on I told MT I'd be surprised if she'd kept any of her friends after the book came out because she was not kind at all.  She excoriates anyone over 60 that does anything remotely active and waxes rhapsodic about the joys of getting old with "giving up sex" at the top of her list.   Then her son gives her her first grandchild and a not insignificant portion of the rest of the book is a gooey love fest with her grandson at the center.    It's at about the same point in the book the it also became obvious that her whole never having sex again thing is going to go the way of all ridiculous resolutions - she doth protest too much.  By the end Ironside is redeemed and the desire to call this a coming of age book for the senior set becomes irresistible.    This isn't a book I'd have spent money on, but as a book in a box full of books that cost me pennies, it was't bad.  No doubt that if I were to reread this book in a couple of decades, I'll find much more to identify with.