The stories in our seventh annual feature on debut authors over the age of fifty who published their first books in the past year are narratives of resilience, of persistence, of writing through rejection and loss and, in some cases, through trauma. They are stories of problem-solving, of hard-earned realizations both private and public; stories of small failures, sure, but also stories propelled forward by success. Together they compose a single story of time, of perseverance, of the simple truth that it is never too late to be a writer, to tell your own story, and to share it with the world.

Madhushree Ghosh, author of Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory, and Family (University of Iowa Press)
Sari Botton, author of And You May Find Yourself: Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo (Heliotrope Books)
David Santos Donaldson, author of Greenland (Amistad)
Shareen K. Murayama, author of Housebreak (Bad Betty Press)
Jane Campbell, author of Cat Brushing (Grove Atlantic)

Madhushree Ghosh

Age: 52. Residence: San Diego, California. Book: Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory, and Family (University of Iowa Press, April 2022), a food memoir and personal narrative that addresses the question of what it means to belong to one’s country of birth as well as an adopted one, as seen through the lens of the author’s life as a woman of color in science as well as an immigrant daughter of refugees who left an abusive marriage, and braided with the lives of chefs, home cooks, and food-stall owners. Agent: Dana Newman. Editor: Susan Hill Newton.

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Dear writer, I wrote a food narrative memoir. I call it this-is-what-you-write-when-you-write-about-things-that-matter. My first physical book is my eighth manuscript. Multiple drafts sit in my Google Drive. But you have those on your own hard drives too, don’t you?

Writing in America for a white readership has been interesting. I started out writing fiction and willingly adapted my natural style of show-and-tell to only show, don’t tell, thereby erasing the folklore and desi storytelling I grew up on. I did it willingly because I wanted to belong; it’s what I felt I needed to do to be seen and heard. Erasure would let the readers know my land and me—this is what I thought was needed.

Writing fiction was a deliberate choice, much like watching the fantastical song-and-dance routines of Bollywood movies. In my writing I wanted to escape my high-stress world of biotech diagnostics. I wanted to create worlds different from mine, but I ended up writing a fictional version of my own. I transferred an unhappy marriage, a weird sense of humor, and immigrant life to my fictional characters. For two decades my practice included writing two hours before my biotech job started and three hours after dinner—a habit I cling to dearly. In 2003 my then-agent took my spectacularly awful first novel to big publishing houses looking for the next great Indian author. “I’d hold on to that job if I were you,” she concluded.

Two decades later I still work in oncology diagnostics. Publishing houses continue to look for the next great South Asian author.

A decade ago my marriage fell apart. My writing stalled. My brain became silent. I switched to nonfiction to make sense of what life was handing to me. I returned to folklore, show and tell—back to my desi roots. I wrote about the marital abuse I experienced. The story of an immigrant daughter of refugees, a woman of color in science—a life of privilege, mixed with discrimination and trauma. Of Ma and Baba’s displaced lives from the British partition of India. Of food as language.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not like I abandoned fiction for nonfiction—both have a place in my life as a writer. It’s just that to work through life, especially trauma, in my case, I could only explore it and make sense of what was happening through nonfiction/memoir. However, my science brain also guided me to look for connections outside of the personal, in the universal. And what could be more universal than food? The type of cuisine, the availability of certain produce, how and why we cook, what it says when we make a dish a certain way—it all leads to the question of what is comfort, what is home? In corporate/biotech worlds, to place a plate of food in between negotiators is a message that both parties are not only sharing a meal, but also engaging in a discussion to see where they have common ground. In a “foreign” country, eating food that one didn’t grow up with, one navigates to find a similar common ground—what is comforting in that taste, texture, sweetness, or saltiness? Why are we drawn to it, or not?

The lack of, removal of, or access to food is also a story. I realized that when I wrote memoir I naturally gravitated toward what Ma made, what Baba brought home, and how I re-created that in America, knowing the spices, flavors, and ingredients weren’t the same. In doing so I tried to answer the age-old global question: What is home?

Years before the University of Iowa Press asked for Khabaar, fantastic literary magazine editors guided my essays onto their pages. It took two decades to collect the essays that make up Khabaar, and yet it feels like it happened overnight. I focused on writing a good book.

Once I had the manuscript ready, I was connected to my agent, Dana Newman, through another writer friend. Dana did what she does best: She passionately negotiated for me. I focused on writing a book she could sell and didn’t try to do her job or second-guess her. It’s a win-win situation because we are a team. Influenced by Dana’s calming presence in the lead-up to publication, my recommendation to you is that you leave the drama on the page; don’t bring it to your publishing life. The rest is noise.

The obsession with writers’ age seems very Western to me. The need for elastic skin, unwrinkled brows, laugh line–less smiles, especially for women and woman-identifying authors, is perplexing and infuriating. The twenty-five-year-old me would have written a different Khabaar than what a fifty-one-year-old me wrote. Don’t compare oranges with tandoori shrimp. Sometimes a circuitous writing journey happens, and sometimes a standard MFA route is followed. And look, what joy! We create worlds, how lucky are we! Why complicate it with lists, “expiry” dates, and the pressure to look a certain way? Fill yourself with joy that you get to write magic.

I can’t wait to read your work. Go, write it, will you?

Sari Botton

Age: 57. Residence: Kingston, New York. Book: And You May Find Yourself: Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo (Heliotrope Books, June 2022), a memoir-in-essays about coming “of age” to feminism and self-actualization as an older person, discovering the courage to resist conforming to fit in, and realizing how maybe it’s never too late to find your way. Agent: Melissa Flashman. Editor: Naomi Rosenblatt.

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I encountered many obstacles on the path to publishing my debut memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself: Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo, at fifty-six. But without a doubt, the biggest obstacle standing in my way was yours truly. For too long I let my fears and self-doubt interfere with my commitment and focus while I hid myself behind my work as a ghostwriter and editor.

I always knew I wanted to write a memoir but felt conflicted about it after a few personal essays I published early on upset people in my life. It left me gun-shy about engaging in a kind of writing that exposes others, especially those who’d prefer to remain incognito. I’d also made some bad choices with regard to exposing myself—particularly in my mid-forties, during the early twenty-teens. In those days I let low-quality websites publish half-baked essays of mine in which I revealed some of my worst relationship choices without fully processing them and making meaning of them.

I hadn’t fully given up, though. For years I was still writing—just intermittently and tentatively. I invested a great deal of energy in a sort of side quest: trying to determine the most ethical way to approach writing about other people. To that end I interviewed many memoirists about how they handled it. I learned that solutions to this problem weren’t one-size-fits-all; different writers approached this in their unique ways, informed by their own experiences and senses of morality.

Through those conversations, over time, I came around to a system that felt right for me: First, I wrote a warts-and-all “vomit draft” that I didn’t intend to publish, to get the hardest parts of the story out of my head—so I could feel emotionally unburdened by them and look at them from different angles. I allowed some time to pass before the next draft, so that I could process and gain meaningful understanding of the more difficult parts I wrote while finding compassion for myself and others. With each draft I blurred people’s identities to a greater and greater extent. With an eye toward generosity, I extracted any unnecessary details of other people’s choices and behavior. I worked to get the stories to a state in which they were no longer just about me and the specific people I included but more broadly about common cultural phenomena that others would relate to. Before publication I showed the work to people close to me who figure prominently in the book.

Despite having figured all that out for myself, I remained reluctant, so I interviewed even more memoirists. At some point in my early to mid-fifties, I realized that in continuing my “research” I was stalling. I’d also started to resent the work I was doing editing and teaching other, mostly younger writers, ushering so many of them in the direction of book deals while neglecting to pursue my own. What’s more, in the back of my mind was the realization that both of my grandmothers had died around my age—one at fifty-one, the other at fifty-five. Here I was wasting time, yet who knew how much of it I had left?

It was time to buckle down. In 2019 I finally did, polishing the book proposal I’d had in the works for a few years. I gave it to my agent, who took it out to some traditional publishers. I was excited for about two weeks. Then one by one they passed, and it messed with my already shaky confidence. I was overcome with impostor syndrome. Who was I to think I had permission to write my memoir? To believe that my story and voice mattered?

Then a friend shared with me a list of small indie presses she’d compiled. I got my agent to submit to some, including Heliotrope, a tiny publisher based in New York City’s East Village, where much of my story takes place. Editor and publisher Naomi Rosenblatt not only got my book; at a lunch at Café Mogador during which she made her offer, she basically sold my book to me, explaining why it was necessary: that there were people of all ages who would see themselves in my midlife coming-of-age book, which was also about feeling out of step with peers and finding the courage not to conform—things that many can relate to.

She was right. Since publishing my book in June, I’ve received messages from readers of all ages and genders letting me know how various essays really spoke to them. It’s been incredibly validating.

But before I could get to this happy place, while anxiously writing the book through the worst of the pandemic, I had to keep myself from quitting. Actually, it helped to give myself permission to quit. When I lost faith in myself and the book—when people were dying and I thought, who cares about my stories of not fitting in?—I would envision a Zoom chat with my agent and editor during which I told them I was throwing in the towel. Usually this happened in the wee hours of the morning. But then each time when I arose, I recommitted myself. I realized that after so many years of working on this material, it was now or never—that if I bailed on my hard-won book contract, it could damage my reputation, end my relationship with my agent, and put me even further afield from my lifelong dream.

Eventually I finished a draft. I put it through two more rounds of blurring and what I call “declawing,” as in taking out anything that might be unnecessarily hurtful. Finally I arrived at a draft that I could get behind.

Once the book was out I was presented with a new challenge: I had to get the word out about it, mostly on my own. I’ve loved working with a tiny indie press and recommend seeking publication with one if you’re having a hard time landing a traditional deal. But having to be a squeaky wheel for my own work is uncomfortable. I struggle to find the chutzpah necessary to say, please pay attention to me, a writer with a tiny press, a middle-aged woman no less, the kind of person you’re used to not seeing.

Thank goodness for the readers who keep reaching out with positive feedback after they get and read the book—mostly on my recommendation. It reminds me of why I must keep spreading the word—and stop feeling uncomfortable about it.

David Santos Donaldson

Age: 60. Residence: Brooklyn, New York. Book: Greenland (Amistad, June 2022), a novel-within-a-novel concerning a young author writing about the secret love affair between E. M. Forster and Mohammed el Adl—in which Mohammed’s story collides with his own, blending fact and fiction. Agent: Tom Miller. Editor: Tara Parsons.

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I had given up on the idea of getting published in my lifetime. By the time I reached forty, with an awful sinking in my chest I faced a brutal reality: I would never make one of those famous lists of “Writers Under 40.” I’d been haunted by an article I read in which Kazuo Ishiguro said most great novels were written by authors under forty. At first it sounded ridiculous. What about late bloomers like José Saramago and Penelope Fitzgerald? But there were multiple examples to back up Ishiguro’s claim. Sad and somewhat embittered, I began to mourn the artistic life I’d imagined for myself. When I turned fifty, and my latest novel was not picked up by editors, I faced the harshest reality of all: Not only would I probably never write a great novel, but I would also probably never get published.

There is a great teaching from Atisha, the eleventh-century Bengali Buddhist master: Abandon all hope. Initially this seems like accepting defeat. But the wisdom behind this teaching is that once we give up waiting for our fulfillment to happen in the future, we can fully accept what and who we are right now. Ironically I found that writing from that place of acceptance allowed me to write more honestly and urgently and even to face obstacles I may have been putting in my own way on the road to publication.

For years I got responses from editors who praised my writing but ultimately declined to publish it. The most common response was they couldn’t identify a viable audience for my work. I never understood this because growing up as a queer, Black Caribbean boy, I had easily identified with nineteenth-century Russian and British novels—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Eliot—and the outer trappings of their worlds were nothing like mine. Couldn’t my writing also matter to those who didn’t share my exact identity and worlds?  

I decided that since there wasn’t an audience for my work (according to many editors), I would write whatever I wanted, just for myself. I wouldn’t try to be acceptable to a wider audience. Writing, I realized, is what gave my life meaning—published or not. Writing is also an odd compulsion for me. If I don’t have a writing project, I can barely orient myself. When I’m deep into writing a novel, everything I encounter seems meaningful and somehow relevant to my story. I feel alive, and I’m constantly responding to the world.

Once I accepted that I had to write for myself, the idea of getting published became less essential and more of a game, an interesting puzzle to solve. If it were possible, I asked myself, how could I get my more personal work to somehow fit into the demands of the market? I studied some recent best-selling literary novels and came up with some common stylistic traits. I then experimented with applying those traits to my work: very short chapters and first-person narratives with straightforward prose, for example. But I never compromised my content.

It eventually worked. My next novel, Greenland, was picked up for publication. My process seems to confirm a certain truth: Once we abandon all hope, we are free to be alive in the moment, and when that immediacy makes it onto the page, we give ourselves the best chance of making art others can respond to in kind.

While Ishiguro may have a point about writers under forty, I am no longer haunted by his ghostly words. Great novels have—and will continue to be—written by writers over fifty.

Shareen K. Murayama

Age: 55. Residence: Honolulu. Book: Housebreak (Bad Betty Press, July 2022), a collection of poems that ask how we live within perennial emergency, where belonging and self-protection converge, how we explain loss to children, and what the wind has in common with hate crime. Agent: None. Editor: Amy Acre Hall.

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I consider myself a late bloomer. As a public high school teacher, I have always envied the seniors packed in the gym in silky robes and tassels, ready to evacuate a space, only to fill another, like breath pushing in and out of lungs.

Almost twenty years after receiving my bachelor’s degree in English, I returned to school for my MFA in creative writing. In 2015, after completing my first year, I became a widow at age forty-nine when my life partner died unexpectedly. Loss leaves too many spaces, and much air leaked out of my lungs. But Rilke said that once we push through that solid rock of grief, we can resume our space among the living once again.

With support from the faculty and my cohort members, I completed my MFA the following year. But what then? I had no plans. Could I survive on my own? Would anyone love me, relate to me, touch me ever again? Why be in relationships knowing how they end? And I put into poems all my feelings and existential wonderings.

Someone once said that having an MFA under one’s belt was beneficial in order to begin studying all that we don’t know. And there was so much I didn’t—still don’t—know. I resumed my studies and signed up for anything free, workshops and contests, and I volunteered to read for lit mags and used my library card to read books on noted lists.

In fact it was an open call and the absence of a submission fee for a chance to publish a poetry collection from Bad Betty Press that changed my life. I just needed to e-mail ten poems. I thought, I have ten poems. Some of them had been published online or in print journals. The founding editors of Bad Betty, Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall, e-mailed back and asked to see my full collection. Could I send it over? That’s how it began. It ended with Housebreak being chosen as one of two poetry collections published by the press this year, along with British writer Molly Naylor’s Whatever You’ve Got, and a book tour with dates to perform in London and Bristol, England.

When I was writing those poems and borrowing poetry books from the library, I inspected the poets’ acknowledgements pages. Their lists included artist residencies and grants and paragraphs of people’s names. I added everything to my study list, and I was further convinced that I’d never publish anything because I didn’t know many people. Writing can be very lonely.

So, my last tip, at least one that’s worked for me, is to engage your community on social media. I’ve been lucky to surround myself with encouraging, intelligent writers who take time to read and share my pieces that resonate with them, and I, in turn, support their writing. I’m trying to make the table bigger for more voices. In this way, writing and connecting with writers has been symbiotic, inspiring.

While I can’t speak for all writers, I know I needed space and distance to narrativize my life moments on the page. I think love and death, joy and anger are universal themes that can be accessible, unforgettable, and celebratory. When you’re questioning yourself like I do on a weekly basis, think of Sean Thomas Dougherty’s poem “Why Bother?” and remember that someone out there has “a wound in the exact shape / of your words.”