Clare Pooley's writing career began with her last sip of wine. To cope with the monumental decision to quit drinking and a cancer diagnosis, the one-time advertising executive turned full-time mother of three started blogging anonymously as SoberMummy. When her blog, "Mummy was a Secret Drinker," was spun into a book in 2017 ("Sober Diaries"), an author was born.
Pooley could have continued down the self-help track, but she jumped into fiction instead. Her next book, "The Authenticity Project," corrals a group of people who find friendship through a journal left at a coffee shop. "Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting" brings together strangers via a commuter train, and in Pooley's latest, "How to Age Disgracefully," a club is the impetus for disparate seniors to get to know each other.
Are you sensing a pattern? Pooley is all about creating community, and an inclusive one at that. Older, young, rich, poor, gay, straight and all races. She creates a reason for the characters to come together and then they interact in sometimes comical but always satisfying ways.
No one is left without an appropriate denouement. In "How to Age Disgracefully" the ball gets rolling when newly minted 70-year-old Daphne decides its time to leave the confines of her London flat — a beautiful one that looks out on the Thames — and interact with the world again. For 15 years, she's kept to herself, "utterly alone, stalking her neighbors [on OurNeigbhors.
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