Q. At 55, I have a pervading sense of failure. As a teenager I flunked my exams and received only one offer of a place at university. I managed to scrape a 2:1 and met the man I would marry. I went on to do a job that didn’t require a degree in order to support my husband’s fledgling business. I was first diagnosed with MS aged 27 and by my thirties it started to take hold. Divorce followed. Rationally I know that many of my problems were out of my control or mistakes easily made, but I struggle to accept this. Is there a novel that might help me reframe my insecurities?
A. Midlife is no time to pick over your past in forensic detail. To paraphrase LP Hartley in The Go-Between, as far as I’m concerned it’s a foreign country and so of course we did things differently there. No use crying over spilt milk, as my granny wisely used to say. From 50 onwards our gaze should instead be relentlessly forward-focused. There’s so much left to do and even the most optimistic person would accept that there’s less time in which to do it. So how about we find some literary channels that might prompt you to set your eye on the horizon where possibility lies, not mired in a past you can’t change?
You sound as if you might need some lightening up to start with. Where better to kick off than with a slim-backed, darkly comic female revenge fantasy. My Sister, the Serial Killer, by the debut novelist Oyinkan Braithwaite, is a fabulously unfettered story of a woman who finds herself in the role of accomplice to her sibling, who has a penchant for murdering bad men. Obviously, it’s no way to conduct yourself in real life but as an escapist indulgence, a place to explore dysfunctional dreams instead of acting on them; it’s quite the romp, enhanced by its setting in the frenetic heat and chaos of contemporary Lagos.
Autobiographies occasionally offer us a way to put our own experiences into some sort of perspective. One of my favourite stories of triumph over adversity again touches down in Nigeria but it is mostly set in the Scotland of the author’s childhood. Born in 1961 to a Scottish nurse and a Nigerian student, Jackie Kay was adopted shortly afterwards by a white communist couple and reared in Glasgow among comrades. Her memoir, Red Dust Road, takes us on a journey through her challenging life. Pregnant with her son in 1988, she follows her writer’s instinct to trace the story of her parents in order to uncover her own roots.
The book embraces pain and trauma, abandonment and isolation, yet it is as heart-warming and motivating as you will find. Kay resolutely refuses to be the sum of her experiences but instead finds humour and love even in dark corners, such as when she finally finds her biological father, a Christian evangelist, and he spends their reunion praying for her sin, rather than asking forgiveness for his own.
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Sadly imbued with new-found resonance after the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan is Khaled Hosseini’s tragic but in the end uplifting bestseller A Thousand Splendid Suns. It charts the experiences of Mariam and Laila, two girls approaching womanhood in Kabul, where they are married off to the same bullying man in circumstances that would seem to deny any possibility of fulfilment or happiness. It’s a gripping saga but also one that helps put our own individual woes into context, which is ultimately the best way to understand that we are not personally selected for misfortune. How we choose to respond, rise above it or abandon it in order to move forward is where our individualism comes into play.
Finally, for more practical fare you could read my own Cracking the Menopause (you’re in a phase of your biological life that won’t help you on the confidence front) and Julia Samuel’s most instructive This Too Shall Pass.
Write to Mariella
Got a dilemma about work, love, life or family? Mariella can find a book to help you through. Email mariella@sunday-times.co.uk and she will choose one question a week to answer. Anonymity on request
