“What I wanted to say, from quite an angry point of view, was, yes, old women are totally functioning human beings.”
, her well-reviewed book of short stories, Campbell spoke to Slate about being an 80-year-old debut author and why more angry, sexy old ladies is exactly what the publishing industry needs. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.Heather Schwedel: You published a debut book of short stories this year at 80. Were you writing all along, or did you start writing more recently?When I was about 8, I wrote an ode to a peanut by a squirrel. I don’t know if that answers your question.
I do wonder about my hubris in a way. To be honest, I was on holiday in Bermuda. I was staying with my eldest son. Nothing in these stories is true—it’s all fiction—but the settings are very accurate, because I was on holiday with my eldest son and his lovely wife, and he had two cats. One was called Lucy. Lucy liked being brushed, and I was brushing her. Now, my son was at work, my daughter-in-law was away. I was alone in the house. And I just began to develop the idea of the story.
I think partly it’s because I am an old woman. And a lot of them were written from the point of view of anger. Dorothy Sayers wrote, a long time ago, a paper, “Are Women Human?” She was trying to persuade the patriarchal world, which was even worse in her day, that women were people, that they were human beings. And I think that old women are kind of othered in a curiously destructive way, in a way that probably old men aren’t.
Does any part of you bristle at your age being one of the main things that is mentioned in marketing materials and reviews of your work?
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