When your age and your body don't tally

and a brilliant short novel by Anne Tyler

There are some things that make me feel safe; like being in bed, or having a hot bath or reading an Anne Tyler novel.

Anne Tyler started writing novels before I was born and, fortunately for the world, she is still writing them. There is not a single one of these novels that I have not loved. Her writing is gentle yet profound, emotional yet domestic, insightful, compassionate and relatable. And her characters are even more than that.

Three Days in June is a short novel that you can read in a day but will want to read over a year. It tells the story of a divorced couple who spend the weekend of their daughter’s wedding together with a particular focus on Gail, the mother of the bride and a complex character who lacks ‘people skills’. As the story unfolds we learn more about Gail and her husband, what happened to their marriage and how it has affected their attitudes to their daughter’s wedding. If you are like me you will fall in love with Gail and her quirky nature, you will start to root for Max and his gentle laissez faire attitude. You might also fall in love with a cat. No spoilers but all the characters are so beautifully imagined it’s hard not to want to know them better.

I loved the whole book but I loved the end in a special way. I have now read the last page about seven times - and it makes me feel warm and happy every time I do it.

There was one other line in the book that jumped out at me and lodged in my chest because they are words I have often thought but never expressed quite so well. Tyler writes of her character Gail,

“I’m too young for this, I thought. Not too old, as you might expect, but too young, too inept, too uninformed. How come there weren’t any grownups around. Why did everyone just assume I knew what I was doing?”

I often feel like I am still waiting to grow up, to feel old, to be mature and sensible - to choose to sit on the couch instead of the floor, to know how to act in all social situations, to not care about the little things quite so much anymore because, apparently at my age you are supposed to have no fucks to give. I still have plenty of fucks to give.

I look grownup but I don’t feel it, hell I haven’t even decided what I want to be when I grow up. How did it come to be like this? That I have lived so much life and yet I still feel like I have no idea what I am doing? I remember being young and looking at adults who had it all together - but now I wonder if they really did. Maybe they were also walking around in adult skin being young at heart.

The worst part of not feeling like a grownup for me, is that I need other grownups to be somewhere on the scene; I rely on proper grownups who will look after me and make sure that everything doesn’t comes crashing down into a big heap because it’s been constructed with wooden blocks and no foundations. It’s not so cool when you are 56 and looking for a grownup to tell you it’s all going to be okay, especially when deep down you know that even if they pretend to be grownup, underneath it all they are probably dealing with the same things you are.

But if Anne Tyler, at 83 can write a character like Gail at 61 who can encapsulate exactly how I feel at 56, maybe I am in very good company and I should just concentrate on that instead.

How old are you inside? Anywhere near the age of your body?