Waiting for a Party leads us into the mind of an older woman, still nurturing her sexuality, despite her fallible memory and her deteriorating body.

Claire Meadows, 92, is lying in bed on a Sunday morning, looking forward to the 102nd birthday party of her friend Martin in his retirement home. As she reminisces about her life, her thwarted ambition to become a concert pianist, her missed opportunities to have children, and her friends and lovers, mostly dead, she is troubled by the part she played, consciously or not, in the death of her husband. Was she responsible, or was it an accident? Or even a suicide willingly assisted by her? And what led to her mixed feelings of fear and relief when the body was taken away?

Widowed, her outlook is changed by a casual sexual encounter, and in the years that follow she catches up with the experiences she missed by marrying at twenty-two. Most of her brief liaisons are unfulfilling until, at a concert, she sits next to a man whose face intrigues her. The memory of that relationship still excites her many years after his death.

When she first met her husband, who was more than twenty years her senior, she was lost, or that is what she came to believe. For the next thirty years, he made all the decisions on her behalf. She had to adjust to his lifestyle and relinquish her musical ambitions. Yet, looking back, she insists that she was happy in her marriage. But her memories are unreliable and sometimes contradictory. She is aware that she has difficulty distinguishing between memory and imagination. However, despite her advanced age, her desire for love and sexual intimacy is undiminished. She dreams of being sexually desired, while aware that, at ninety-two, the dream is bound to remain just that.

But she does now have a family: Zach, her adopted son, and Gabriel, his partner, now both in their early sixties, show her love and affection.  This is a story of a life-enhancing journey from a state of confusion and insecurity to one of self-knowledge and contentment.

Vesna Main on the genesis of the novel:

Many years ago, in a national newspaper, I came across a letter from a woman in her early nineties, whose lover of several years, a man in his mid-eighties, had just told her that he had found someone else. Her feelings of hurt surprised her. She had imagined that, at her age, she should not care. In response, readers assured her that everyone needed love and physical intimacy, regardless of how old they were.

I had no intention of writing about the elderly correspondent until, one day, a short story came to me about a woman who, at sixty-two, has her first orgasm in a one-night stand. The story was published, and later I wondered what had happened to the woman. The answer to that is the novel.

I hope to have shown that a formally ambitious novel does not have to sacrifice accessibility and that it can result in an entertaining story that is likely to resonate with many readers. I have noticed that there is a Zeitgeist for texts about older women’s sexuality; however, there are no novels that takes the form of Waiting for a Party.