A Certain Age

Following her 2016 Stella Award winning novel The Natural Way of Things, CHARLOTTE WOOD wanted to write something completely different. The result was The Weekend, a look at friendships and ageing that is as sharp as it is tender. MAX LEWIS writes.

Both of Charlotte Wood’s parents died young. Naturally, the thought of dying in the prime of her life became a source of anxiety. As she aged, though, this anxiety changed. The thought struck her like a bullet: ‘What if I don’t die early?’ 

‘I had always been very conscious of the possibility of early death,’ she says. ‘I’d thought so much about preparing myself for that fact, I’d never thought about what it would be like to get old.’

Now in her 50s – the same age her parents were when they died – Wood has written The Weekend, a novel that feels like a logical next step in her contemporary feminist oeuvre, while also being lighter and more comedic than anything she’s written before. 

The lifelong friendship of four older women is rocked when one of them, Sylvie, passes away unexpectedly.  The three remaining women – Jude, Wendy and Adele – convene at Sylvie’s holiday house over the Christmas weekend to clean it out before it is sold. As tensions boil over the days, the three begin to question what made them friends in the first place, and whether the relationship can survive without Sylvie holding it together. 

‘I feel like our culture has decided that, after a certain age, you don’t change anymore. It’s either stasis or decline. I wanted to stake a claim for the courage that allows that sort of deep and continuous change to go on. To stay friends over many decades is hard! Sometimes we don’t like it when our friends change. I feel like real friendship is dependent on the ability to let other people change.’ 

Change – and our prevailing fear of it – buzzes throughout The Weekend. Wendy, an acclaimed feminist academic, is afraid of losing her senile dog, Finn, who she received from Sylvie after her husband passed away. Adele has lost her house and her partner, and is struggling to accept that her acting career may never return to the glamour of her heyday. Jude, retired from running a fine-dining restaurant, is complacent in her decades-old affair with a married wealthy man, yet soon faces a crisis that upturns everything. 

‘They think they know who they are and how things will unfold. Yet in this weekend together, all of this is upended. When I was younger I thought, “The older I get the better I know myself.” Now I’m not sure if that’s true. So the book is a kind of cautionary self-portrait for me. “What might I be like when I’m 75?”’

While Wood hopes she doesn’t end up like Jude, Wendy or Adele when she’s their age, she admits that each woman is a facet of her own personality. 

‘Adele would be the more childish, self-indulgent side. Jude is the more critical side. Wendy is perhaps the busybody creative side; she’s so focused on her work that she’s not very thoughtful about the people in her life. All of them are parts of me – I wanted to take a truthful look about people, rather than a romanticised look at ageing, or friendships.’

Similarly to how The Weekend presents a naturalistic view of ageing and relationships, it also doesn’t romanticise loss. It’s a morbid reminder of how those around you will have to keep existing even when there’s a person-shaped hole in their lives. Wood recognises that losing her parents at a young age led to a deeper familiarity with this concept compared to her contemporaries. 

‘Life is a continual process of loss, but also regeneration out of that loss. When our culture thinks about ageing, it only thinks about loss. But really, loss is happening from birth. We lose our childhood, our innocence, our friends, but we gain a lot, too.’

In 2016, Wood was awarded the Writer in Residence Fellowship at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre. Part of her residence was dedicated to offering literary views on the topic of ageing, yet the academics and researchers she met along the way provided immense insight for The Weekend. One such researcher was an evolutionary biologist researching dementia in dogs, who inspired Wood to include an animal. This turned into Finn, Wendy’s senile dog who, in a manner both absurd and fascinating, becomes a vessel for great change in the three women. 

‘Finn turned out to be a useful way place to project their fears of ageing. But I also liked the spooky aspect, where animals can represent all kinds of otherworldly presences. Animals can play a symbolic role; they can be powerful carries of emotion and things that can’t be spoken. I feel like animals have access to another plane of existence that humans don’t enter into. So Finn was this kind of beautiful, rich player for me to offer a more mysterious place for these women to have realisations about themselves.’ 

Wood began her fellowship following the publication of her award-winning novel The Natural Way of Things; an Atwood-inspired, dystopian feminist novel, popularised during the progressive storm of #MeToo and The Handmaid’s Tale on TV.  In a lot of ways, The Weekend reads like a defiant opposition to everything that made The Natural Way of Things popular. 

‘Often when I finish a book I think, “Ugh! I just want to do the opposite of that.” The last book was young women; this one will be old women. The last one was dystopian, this will be naturalistic. I think it’s also a lot more cheerful; there’s a lot of sadness but also a lot of humour. The main difference is that it’s a celebration; of life and change and friendship, especially in those we feel have been cemented. Ideally, at the end of the book, the reader will reflect on their own friendships, and think that they might have more life in them than they think.’ • 

The Weekend by Charlotte Wood is published by Allen & Unwin.