Self-help shelves are filled with guides to surviving midlife, but where is the fiction? Lisa Allardice talks to Marian Keyes, Joanne Harris and others about ‘hot-flush lit’
Joanne Harris was rereading Carrie by Stephen King during lockdown when she got the inspiration for her new novel, Broken Light. The novelist had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and King’s horror story was all her “chemo-brain” could cope with, she says on a video call from her home in Yorkshire. The story of a girl who gets telekinetic powers at puberty, Carrie was a favourite for Harris growing up. “Of course it was!” she exclaims. “It’s all about the drama of adolescence and the horror of having a changing body that does unpredictable stuff.”
Reading it again in her 50s she was struck by the idea: “What if Carrie had lived and her powers had kicked in at menopause instead? Nobody wants to give superpowers to a teenager, because of course they’re going to burn everything down.” And so she created Bernie Moon, who in middle age discovers she is able to inhabit other people’s minds and set them on a different course – predatory men become a particular target. “It’s menopausal Carrie,” she says gleefully. She started writing when she was ill (the effects of chemotherapy “were like the menopause but worse,” she says) and didn’t stop. She got the all-clear this Christmas: “So I thought: ‘OK, I’m feeling good about this.’”
