Just spent a weekend at the beach reading SUGAR TIME, a new novel by a writer I first read in your magazine - Jane Adams. It's a funny story about a woman "our" age who has to choose between career success and late-life love, and Sugar's one of the most accessible characters I've come across in fiction in years. I would recommend this book to anyone who's still between "her first copy of Modern Maturity and her first Social Security check," as Sugar says...it's chick lit for grown up women!
Sugar Kane, the heroine, isn't naive about Hollywood - she knows that on either side of the camera, women over 50 are an endangered species. A TV producer whose last big hit was a long time ago (think Designing Women, Murphy Brown, Cybil and other icons of the era of smart women and big shoulders), she's finally close to getting a new show network-approved when she's struck by a series of unforeseen events - a bizarre medical condition that looks enough like a heart attack to scare her into reevaluating her priorities, a daughter whose problem pregnancy demands her attention, a manipulative young assistant who's trying to steal her show away, and a man whose own choices make those Sugar has to make a great deal more difficult.
What I loved about this book were Adams' reflections on the real stuff, large and small, of older women's lives - worries about money and security (which are almost never the stuff of fiction, with the exception of a wonderful old Mary Gordon novel called "Spending"); staying relevant professionally as the workplace grows younger; becoming "invisible" to the oppsite sex, etc. - even losing your pubic hair! It's all grist for the author's mill, and her take on these things is often hilarious as well as truthful and touching.
