It’s the book that will make you laugh, cry, and punch the air as the butt-kicking Grace Adams takes back her own. Author Fran Littlewood chats about dealing with teenage daughters, the move towards talking more about menopause, and the bespoke Love Island cake, a contentious character in itself.
Do you think readers will relate to Grace? If so, why?
There were moments when I was writing the book – especially the moments when I was having a LOT of fun with Grace, the honest, raw, dark humour moments – when I would say to my husband, I think women will be punching the air reading this! My instinct told me that, and it helped me steer away from this whole issue of ‘likeability’ in female characters (held, as they are, to a higher standard than male protagonists …). But I have to say, even so, I was stunned by the reaction to the book from ‘hardened’ publishers when it first went out. The fact that it made them both laugh and cry felt like the holy grail. Since then, early readers have said that in reading the book they felt ‘seen’, which is everything I could have hoped for.
Why was it important to you to describe the ambush of age Grace faces in the novel?
In addition, women at this stage of their lives are expected to be all things to all people. We are being squeezed from both sides. If we have children, we’re dealing with the difficult teenage years, and at the other end of the spectrum, our parents are ageing, so we’re also coping with increased frailty, illness, or bereavement. It’s a huge domestic burden that, data shows, falls largely to women. The emotional labour involved in family is almost exclusively ours too – anything men might do is seen as a bonus, with women it’s expected – and it’s exhausting. Women are held to a higher standard than men, and as such, are expected to do all this with a smile on our faces. Showing anger is not acceptable – the ‘calm down dear’ narrative is all pervasive still. There’s a personal and political voicelessness, a real sense that we are not ‘seen’. Something that is being exacerbated with the continued and terrifying global lurch to the right.
BUT, there is hope in this book! Over the course of this single long, hot day, the scales fall from Grace’s eyes. So that hers is a (literal and metaphorical) journey of reflection, reckoning and ultimately redemption. Author and Professor of Medical Health Humanities, Christie Watson, who’s just published a non-fiction book on menopause, puts it brilliantly, when she says: ‘The midlife journey is a necessary falling apart to put yourself back together: you’re shaken awake to the precious and precarious nature of this one life you have. And my goodness that makes you appreciative. The perimenopause is a becoming, a walking towards wisdom and what could be more joyful than that?’
In the book, you write very directly about the perimenopause/menopause. Did you feel this was important?
I was keen to tackle this huge issue head on, since, in one way or another, it’s something that will affect half of the population, and it’s been sidelined up until very recently. There’s been a lot of misinformation, or no information at all, and women were – are – just ‘getting on with it’, suffering in a lot of cases, both physically and in terms of mental health. Statistics show that suicide rates for women peak at this time of life. I also think perimenopause happens a LOT earlier than we generally understand or acknowledge, catching many women – and I’m including myself in this – unawares.
I want to preface this next bit by saying, obviously I LOVE the NHS. My sister and brother-in-law are both doctors. But the barrier of medical sexism is a big part of the problem. It’s informed my writing and it’s something I want to flag. Not least because I broke my elbow a few years ago in my mid-forties, having never broken a bone before. When I saw the orthopaedic consultant at the hospital, I told him I knew this was something that could happen with menopause, and wondered if maybe I had an issue with bone density. The consultant looked at his colleague and – clearly panicking at the mention of the ‘m’ word – smirked, and told me absolutely not.
“Remember that no one gives us anything. We have to seize what we want.”
And that was the end of it. Until two or three years later – after I’d finished writing Grace, in fact, and seeing the doctor about my own perimenopause symptoms had finally found its way to the top of my list. I mentioned the broken elbow again, and my (female) doctor referred me for a bone density scan – something I know I was very lucky to get, as this isn’t the experience of lots of women. The upshot is: I have osteopenia, which is the stage before osteoporosis. A diagnosis that would/should have been spotted a number of years earlier if my concerns about my own body had been taken seriously, and which I could have treated much sooner. I want other women to know this – it’s the kind of information we should be sharing.
Do you think there is a ‘menopause movement’ happening at the moment?
Yes, absolutely I do, and it’s brilliant – and not before time. It’s incredible to think now, that at the point I was writing the book, back at the beginning of the first lockdown in 2020, hardly anyone was talking about this. Just a few courageous women in the public eye, on podcasts and in the media. But as I was writing the book, a number of non-fiction books were announced in the trade press, and some women with a platform were talking more about menopause, and it started to feel like a movement. It’s so great that a conversation is beginning to happen around this, but it’s a conversation in its infancy and we need to keep talking about it. So that things are better for our daughters when they get there.
How has your own personal experience of having three teenage daughters influenced the story of Grace and her daughter Lotte?
It was an accidental theme that emerged for me, the grief of a mother losing her child to adulthood. On top of this, there’s the near-comedic clash of hormones – the terrible timing of it all. That just as daughters are reaching adolescence, their mothers are entering perimenopause – the horrible irony in that. A real ‘kick a woman when she’s down’ situation that I explore in the book.
I also think that societally we’re doing a real disservice to our children right now, particularly teenage girls – caught up, as they are, in an all-consuming and toxic social media environment, which is completely unregulated, and that further distances them from us, as parents. No wonder there’s a mental health crisis among young people. There is so much pressure on girls to conform to an impossible beauty standard, an impossible standard of being full stop. I think it’s crushing our girls – the messages being fired at them incessantly, this dangerous bubble they’re living in, a kind of 24-hour surveillance, the endless social comparison, which I think is setting feminism back years. My girls, who go to a north London secondary school, are told that girls aren’t funny, endure rape jokes, and are squeezed into ever smaller spaces both in and out of the classroom – and my girls are pretty feisty, they are no shrinking violets (!) – we talk about feminism and female representation and misogyny all the time at home to try and redress the balance, but they are still being bludgeoned by it. How could they not be? They’re also, of course, already prey to the casual sexual harassment that comes as standard – my fourteen-year-old was catcalled in the street just the other week, by a man in a van. She was in her school uniform. She’s a child.
Isabel Allende talks about this – about the crisis of violence against women and girls – in her memoir/ manifesto The Soul of a Woman. She says profound changes are needed and that it’s ‘us, women, who can impose them’. She says: ‘Remember that no one gives us anything. We have to seize what we want.’ And I would say this is exactly what I tried to do with Grace in the book. She’s a woman who rises up, who steps outside of these false prescribed spaces ‘assigned’ to women and girls, and goes out and seizes what she wants.
“Amazing Grace Adams is about women being more daring.”
A special cake is important in the novel. Tell us a bit about it?
In the story, although Grace hasn’t been invited to her daughter’s birthday party, she’s going anyway. She’s ordered an extravagant and expensive cake – a bespoke Love Island cake. It’s a TV show she and her daughter, Lotte, have watched together and bonded over, and that they've loved to hate. Grace hopes the cake will be her calling card, the invite she hasn’t received, a symbol of her unshakeable love for her child. That it will help win her back.
One of the early readers of Grace described the cake as ‘basically one of the characters in the book’. And there’s a lot of resonance in this cake – not least because it doesn’t survive the journey well. Towards the end of the book, there’s a moment when Grace glances down at the cake box in her hand and she thinks to herself that ‘there is a metaphor in this somewhere, the dilapidated box, her caved-in, oestrogen-stripped body.’
I have three teenage daughters, perfect for research into the character of Lotte. I asked them for suggestions for a TV/ film-themed cake, something that would be contemporary and visual and a little bit comedic. Love Island was what they came up with pretty instantly. It’s a huge show among their demographic. I have to say, I’d never watched it before then…
This is your first novel. What did writing it feel like? Did the writing fit easily into your schedule or did you have to make time for it?
I wrote the book in lockdown, including at the point when we were only allowed out of the house for an hour a day. It was a heatwave over here, which was fitting, and our neighbours (who had moved out for the duration) were re-modelling their house from the ground up, including pneumatic drilling, the works. And we were homeschooling three children, two of them teenagers (and trapped …) at the time. Everything was amplified and it all felt very acute. So … it wasn’t difficult to get into Grace’s headspace. There was a moment when I was writing on the doorstep, trying to escape it all. It was a cathartic write. A cry for help!
My agent had loved the idea from a very early one-line pitch, and so she was championing me all the way, which made all the difference. I wrote it pretty intensely as a result – the first draft completed in just under nine months. I think the unique circumstances just came together to enable that. BUT, I had put in my 10,000 hours before then, learning the craft, and including all the usual rejection, so I almost hate to put a timeframe on it because it isn’t really an accurate reflection of the real time taken. Also, I know those kinds of comments are fantastically annoying to read.
Do we all need to dare more?
Ultimately, the book is about women being more daring. About stepping outside the prescribed spaces ‘assigned' to us, and making some noise. There was some interesting research I came across a while back. A female social scientist made a study of junior school breaktimes, and showed that boys take up 90 per cent of the space in the playground; girls just 10 per cent. You can see it – the football pitch, versus the bits around the edge. The social conditioning – the ‘brainwashing’ – starts early … Girls are literally taking up less space. But, clearly, this illustrates in the broadest sense where we’re at culturally, systemically too. I can’t quite believe this is still the case, and we – and by that I mean men and women, both – need to make urgent changes.
Amazing Grace Adams is out now. READ AN EXTRACT.
YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY
Q&A with We All Want Impossible Things Author, Catherine Newman