Post-40 Bloomer: Mary Costello’s Immaculate Sadness

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There is much sadness, of the starkly honest and lonely variety, in Costello’s stories. She gets it so right – achingly right – how love and loss are indistinguishable.
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Post-40 Bloomer: Anna Keesey’s Little Century

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Little Century is a book I’d recommend to anyone who embraces the dark and bright sides of life with equal gusto.
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Post-40 Bloomer: Mary Wesley, That Sort of Girl

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There was no stopping her now. She wrote like a woman possessed, scrawling on the back of old manuscripts and whatever she could find. She had a soft touch for dark themes, offering deception and adultery the same respect as the rest of the natural world they occupied. The only sin she couldn’t forgive her characters was cruelty.
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Post-40 Bloomer: Spencer Reece, The Poet’s Tale

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We needed such a story. The romance, the sense of “close call." We need these stories to counter the inevitability of obscurity; we need stories that kindle our sense of hope, and possibility. In truth, I wouldn’t blame fans or journalists for altering or exaggerating the story. I understand why we need it to be as dramatic as possible.
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Post-40 Bloomers: Harriet Doerr’s Impossible Perfection and Happiness

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At age 65, she re-enrolled at Stanford to finish the degree she’d abandoned 47 years earlier. Her writing teacher, John L’Heureux, was impressed by her writing and personally invited her into the Stegner Fellows program upon her graduation. Doerr published the award-winning Ibarra when she was 74 years old.
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Post-40 Bloomers: Walker Percy, The Original Moviegoer

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It is not like learning a skill or a game at which, with practice, one gradually improves. One works hard all right, but what comes, comes all of a sudden and as a breakthrough. One hits on something… It is almost as if the discouragement were necessary, that one has first to encounter despair before one is entitled to hope.
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Nine Stories, 16 Years in the Making: Post-40 Bloomer Daniel Orozco

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Orientation is not about “alienation,” modern-day or otherwise, nor about the effects of a particular cultural transition or economic decline; it’s about loneliness. About the awful, persistent distance between you and me, between me and me, between each of us and the spiritual-whatever in the universe; all of which keeps us wondering what the hell this life is about, and how we will survive it. This seems an important distinction to me, and what has allowed Orozco’s work – some of it 16 years-old – to debut with full emotional resonance.
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Post-40 Bloomer: Stephen Wetta’s If Jack’s in Love

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Wetta dropped out of high school, lost years of his life to alcohol and drugs, and, even after he sobered up and went back to school, eventually earning a Ph.D. from NYU, he spent more than a decade toiling at low-paying adjunct teaching jobs that at one point briefly landed him in jail for tax evasion. Now, though, at the ripe old age of 56, Wetta has put his fallow years to use in a remarkable first novel that captures the slow unraveling of a working-class Southern family during the Summer of Love.
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Post-40 Bloomers: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Last Leopard

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One indisputable factor that deprived us of more opportunities to luxuriate in Lampedusa’s gifts was a diagnosis of lung cancer at the age of 60. The diagnosis came just a few months after he finished the novel, two publisher rejections already in hand, a third which would arrive weeks before he died in July of that year.
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Post-40 Bloomers: Isak Dinesen, Her Own Heroine

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In a 1957 New York Times interview, she was asked, "Do you then look on your own life as a 'tale'?" "Yes, I suppose so," she replied, "but in a sense only I can grasp. And, after all, the tale is not yet quite finished!"
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Post-40 Bloomers: The Stories of William Gay

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While Gay himself might prize being considered among the Southern greats, his stories of desolation and beauty -- brimming, yes, with the familiar Gothic elements of violence and darkness of hearts -- feed and trouble our souls, whether or not we come to the text already knowing the “timeless tolling of whippoorwills, both bitter and reassuring,” or have passed ugly nights in a honkytonk, or keep a rifle or a pistol (or both) under the bed (as most of Gay’s characters do). “You need to know what a man’s capable of. You need to know what things cost.”
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Post-40 Bloomers: Yvvette Edwards and A Cupboard Full of Coats

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"I suppose I qualify as a late bloomer but I don’t feel like one. The term has connotations of stagnation, finally followed by some kind of transformation. I’d probably prefer to equate myself to a fine wine or good cheese, something that takes time, passion, and dedication to mature perfectly."
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Post-40 Bloomers: “Late” According to Whom?

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I myself am hesitant to use the word “late” (or “older,” for that matter) in reference to writers over 40. Late relative to what and according to whose definition of early or on-time?
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