Praise for New York Times bestselling author Pamela Redmond’s novels
OLDER
“The best part of a sequel is revisiting characters whose fictional lives you were once invested in—and Older is the best kind of sequel—one that reminds us of why we loved the first book, whisks us into that world again, and satisfies us in its new conclusion. Funny, painfully relevant, and very meta (thanks to the success of Younger on TV), I loved every bit of this novel, and finished it with a giant smile on my face.”
—Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of A Spark of Light and Small Great Things
“If Pamela Redmond’s bestseller Younger was a heady cocktail of a novel, Older is a luscious dessert. Tender, wise, and achingly funny, this is the book you want on the beach, in the hammock, and in bed on a rainy day. Try not to devour it in one sitting.”
—Christina Baker Kline, New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train
“Older is a delicious read. It made me smile and laugh out loud and turn pages with sheer delight. Pamela Redmond even made me happy to be older!”
—Ann Hood, bestselling author of The Knitting Circle and The Book That Matters Most
THE POSSIBILITY OF YOU
“Seamlessly weaving the present with the past, The Possibility of You is an exploration of love and family, of race and relationships that combines the best elements of a family saga with an intricate, Chinese box of a mystery story. Complex and compelling and compulsively readable.”
—Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author
“Engrossing.… Bring this on your next beach vacation. Order a margarita. Open to page one and dig in.”
—Glamour
“Am I ready for motherhood? That’s the question that reverberates through three generations of New York women in Pamela Redmond’s compelling family saga. Woven into their absorbing stories are issues of gender and reproductive rights that are still red hot today.”
—More
“With a nod to The Hours, Redmond’s fictional saga personifies the hidden history of unplanned pregnancy as it strains—and blesses—three generations of mothers and children.”
—Good Housekeeping
“Redmond’s beautifully written novel explores the choices women make and the way decisions can influence lives for generations to come.”
—SheKnows
“Deeply satisfying and enjoyable and juicy. I loved the characters, loved the history, and felt like I was absorbed in a world that I didn’t want to let go.”
—Peggy Orenstein, New York Times bestselling author
“Every mother, daughter, wife, and friend will love this novel about women’s lives across the generations: their passions, their challenges, their unbreakable bonds. A gift to savor for yourself and to share with every woman you know.”
—Dorothea Benton Frank, New York Times bestselling author
“For big fans of stories of mothers and daughters and intergenerational ties, Redmond delivers.”
—Library Journal
“Mesmerizingly good.”
—Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author, for Dame
“A crisply paced novel.”
—Publishers Weekly
SUBURBANISTAS
“A delightfully lighthearted story.… Funny, sexy, and heartwarming.”
—Fresh Fiction
“Engagingly told, funny, and real, Suburbanistas will capture the hearts of readers.”
—Booklist
“Redmond’s writing just keeps getting better, and her stories are an absolute delight.… A wonderful book.”
—Dorothea Benton Frank, New York Times bestselling author
BABES IN CAPTIVITY
“Through her women characters, Redmond tells realistic and intriguing stories that will enthrall, and ultimately, surprise readers.”
—Booklist
“A breath of fresh air.… It’s delightful to read about women attempting to find out what really makes them happy, without throwing away their families to accomplish it.”
—BookLoons
“A fast, funny read, with characters you’d love to have as friends.”
—Parenting
THE MAN I SHOULD HAVE MARRIED
“This witty first novel… is utterly charming.”
—Jacquelyn Mitchard, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“I love, love, love The Man I Should Have Married. Pamela Redmond has captured Kennedy’s dilemma with energy and wit. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Alice Elliott Dark, author of Think of England
“This first novel by Redmond differs from standard chick-lit fare in that the heroine has the responsibilities and challenges of motherhood, giving the text added dimension.”
—Library Journal
“Kennedy’s spunk is what elevates this first novel above the average jilted-woman-finds-true-love romance.”
—Booklist
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To my son Owen Redmond Satran, who sparked this idea and fueled it the whole way
prologue
The night before I left the island in Maine, I made a list.
50, I wrote at the top of the first page in a fresh notebook.
I would celebrate my fiftieth birthday in exactly 245 days, and if I was going to do everything I needed and wanted to do before I hit that milestone, I needed to get organized. And busy. And serious.
I underscored the number 50 twice, hard.
Under 50, I wrote Home.
I’d been craving a home, a real home of my own, with a new intensity. I’d enjoyed a creative and healing few years in this rustic cabin loaned to me by my publisher, Mrs. Whitney. I’d been comfortable enough before that living first with my friend Maggie, and then with my boyfriend, now ex-boyfriend, Josh.
But I was heading back to New York and I wanted a place of my own. The first place all my own I’d ever had.
Healthy baby, I wrote down.
My daughter Caitlin’s baby, I meant. Some things were so self-evident it seemed silly to put them on the list. But scarily presumptuous not to.
Money.
A job.
Friends. I already had friends. But I hoped they’d be a bigger part of my life.
I’d spent the last two years getting over the previous three, and now it was time to put that phase of my life behind me. The phase in which I first pretended to be younger, and then lived as if I were, and then wrote about the whole thing. Time to grow up and own my real age, my real self, in time for the big five-oh.
I tapped my pen on the notebook. I knew what I was supposed to write next. Relationship. Man. Dates. Love. Or something like that.
I didn’t want any of those things. Was that terrible? Did that mean there was something wrong with me? I’d spent nearly two years alone now, no man, no love, no sex. It took a while getting used to. For a long time I felt lonely, incomplete.
And then lonely turned to peaceful. Incomplete became whole, strong, perfectly balanced on my own two feet.
So no, I did not aspire to be in love or engaged or married or even dating by the time I turned fifty.
Sex. Some sex would be nice. I wrote that down. Then crossed it out.
I closed the notebook and slipped it into the side pocket of my suitcase, then I got into bed with all my clothes on,
including my fleece and down jacket. I turned out the lamp and lay there for a few minutes, taking in the view that had become so familiar but that I wasn’t sure I’d ever see again. The cabin looked so beautiful in the light from the embers of the wood that had been burning all day in the big stone fireplace. Usually I’d throw some fresh logs on before I fell asleep, so the place would still be warm and the fire would still be alive when I woke up in the morning. But I didn’t do that tonight. I wanted the coals to be cold when I left, because I wasn’t coming back.
I woke up at dawn. All I had to do was tie on my boots before I set out for town and the dock and the boat to the rest of the world. April was still winter in Maine, but the temperature wasn’t quite as biting as it had been, even at sunrise. I wasn’t wearing gloves and I’d taken the daring step of unstrapping the cleats from my boots, given that half the ice had melted to mud.
The Volvo I’d bought when my daughter, Caitlin, was in sixth grade was waiting for me in the parking lot on the mainland. I felt like I was rewinding my life, going back to New York, back to my friend Maggie’s, back to where I’d been before.
But nothing was as it had been before. Josh and I were no longer together, Maggie and Caitlin were both married, and my publishing friend Kelsey was making TV shows in LA.
TV shows, Kelsey told me via Instagram message, were the new books.
At least I had a book, the old-fashioned kind, to show for the time I’d spent on the island. Called Younger, it was a thinly veiled novel about the year I pretended to be a millennial. Mrs. Whitney had wanted me to write and publish it as a memoir, but as the real millennials say, I couldn’t even.
That younger woman I’d been was as unreal as the character in the book. Tonight, Maggie was throwing me a party to celebrate my book and welcome me back to the city. I’d been preparing practically the entire time I’d been on the island to leave my younger life behind. I was ready. But that didn’t mean, I suddenly realized, that I was ready to be older.
one
I could not bring myself to blow a week’s grocery money on parking, so I stubbornly drove around lower Manhattan until I found a spot on the street. The weather had changed from winter to summer in the seven hours it had taken me to drive from Maine to New York. I was wearing hiking boots and corduroys; I’d left my parka in the car and tied my fleece around my waist. By the time I dragged my suitcase the seventeen blocks to Maggie’s loft, I was so drenched in sweat I looked like a contestant in a wet turtleneck contest.
“Were you in an accident?” Maggie blurted.
“I need a shower,” I said.
“Oh, honey,” Maggie said. “You need a lot more than a shower.”
That’s when I focused on the people standing behind Maggie. Apparently it was going to take a team of five—six if you counted me—to pull me into shape for tonight’s party.
I’d been spending a lot of time outdoors, chopping my own wood, walking three miles each way to the only store on the island. The cabin did not contain a full-length mirror or a scale, but I felt stronger and leaner than I had in years. I had all my own teeth and wore clothes I’d bought new in the past decade, which made me practically the Cate Blanchett of my little island.
“She doesn’t look so bad,” scolded Piper the stylist, as if I were not there.
I was about to respond with appreciation, when Piper continued, “She’s got a kind of Olive Kitteridge thing going on.”
Olive fucking Kitteridge?
“Okay, maybe I should do something with my hair,” I said, touching it. I’d kind of forgotten I had hair.
“A deep-conditioning treatment and some color will make a major difference,” said the hairdresser.
“I don’t want to color my hair until I really need to,” I told him.
“You really need to!” the group chorused.
“We’ll do an intensive facial and give you some foundation to correct that redness,” said the makeup artist.
The nail person clucked as she examined my hands. Then she asked me to remove my boots and socks and got down on her knees. Until I saw her reaction, I don’t think I’d ever been tempted to use the word recoil. She looked up at me, eyes shining with what might have been tears.
“Your poor little feet look like hooves,” she said.
Maggie shut the double doors that walled off her and Frankie’s bedroom from the rest of the loft, where a team of two florists was placing six-foot-tall magnolia branches in vintage French metal vases while the caterers set up the bar and the kids chased one another in circles as the nannies flirted with the art assistants.
In this apartment alone, I’d encountered more people in the last ten minutes than I’d seen since New Year’s.
“Let’s get to work,” Maggie said. “We’ve only got five hours.”
* * *
I would love to complain about those five hours, to claim that through my ascetic period living in near-isolation I’d transcended any need for physical indulgence and rejected all outer measures of worth and beauty. But I found myself dozing and possibly purring as I was lathered and scrubbed and rinsed and oiled. I was plucked and waxed and exfoliated and de-hooved.
When the team was done, I felt amazing. And looked… maybe not younger than when I’d walked in, but definitely better.
“Now let’s find you something to wear,” Maggie said.
“I’m wearing my good black dress,” I said.
“You mean the one you wore to your last book party?” asked Maggie.
“She can’t be seen in repeats,” Piper said.
“Nobody’s going to remember,” I told her.
Except Josh, I reminded myself. Josh would remember. He’d been with me when I bought that black dress, the most I’d ever spent on anything without a motor. He’d assured me I looked so amazing it was worth it.
“I mean on Instagram,” Piper said.
“I’m not on Instagram,” I said.
“Other people will post,” Piper said.
Ignoring her, I unearthed the black dress that had been lying folded in my suitcase the whole time I’d been in Maine. It seemed to have faded along the crease lines, but I decided to overlook that. All I saw was the dress in which I’d felt as happy and as beautiful as I’d ever been.
“I’m wearing this,” I said.
Not because I wanted to look good for Josh. We were over. So over. I’d invited him tonight to prove how completely over we were.
I stepped into the dress and zipped it up as far as I could by myself. That dress had always had the magic ability to expand and contract as I gained and lost weight, developed muscles from yoga or a paunch from too much ice cream. But now it hung on me like a black plastic garbage sack, size extra-jumbo.
“You did get skinny,” said Maggie.
“They say as you get older you have to choose between your face and your ass,” said Piper.
So now I was “older”? So now I’d made a choice, and my face had lost?
“You could totally rock this,” Maggie said, pulling a gold minidress from Piper’s overstuffed rack.
“That’s perfect,” Piper said. “Very Mrs. Robinson.”
I guessed Mrs. Robinson was better than Olive Kitteridge, but by then I’d transferred all my fear and loathing onto Piper and, like a rebellious thirteen-year-old, refused to even look at any of the clothes on her rack. No, not like a rebellious thirteen-year-old, like a forty-nine-year-old who could dress herself. And if anyone else didn’t like it, they could bite me.
Ignoring the gold dress, I riffled through Maggie’s closet until I found a pair of stretch, black leather pants and an oversized cream satin blouse.
“The shirt is Frankie’s,” Maggie said.
“Will they mind if I wear it?”
Maggie shrugged. “I’m sure they won’t even notice.”
I found my black lace bra at the bottom of my suitcase—another item that had gotten zero use on the island—and put it on underneath the shirt. Maggie and I wrestle
d back and forth, buttoning (me) and unbuttoning (her) the top button, until Maggie growled, “Leave the fucking button open or I’m going to rip it off.”
I allowed Piper to hook on enormous gold earrings that dangled beneath my now voluminous hair. She insisted I wear her black suede heels, at least until the party got underway and nobody could see my feet anymore. There was a quick knock at the door.
“Fourteen and a half minutes till seven!” Frankie called.
A high school chemistry teacher, Frankie could be relied upon for precision.
“Right out, sweetie!” Maggie said.
But first she steered me over to the mirror, the same mirror where, five years earlier, she’d introduced me to my reconstructed twenty-six-year-old self.
My hair was thick and very brown. My face seemed to glow, but that was definitely the makeup. My outfit made me look like a restaurant hostess with a side gig as a dominatrix.
I didn’t look twenty-six anymore. But I looked as close as I would ever get again.
* * *
Frankie had concocted a special Younger cocktail for the festivities: It involved vodka (the youngest liquor), pink champagne (girly and celebratory), and a sprig of thyme.
“Time, get it?” Frankie winked.
Frankie was tall and round, with cropped strawberry blond hair and ruddy cheeks and round pale eyes magnified by thick-lensed, wide-framed glasses. Frankie was pretty much the opposite of the curvy, sultry Anna Magnani–type Maggie had always been attracted to. They were also the temperamental opposite of Maggie’s usual fiery, high-drama partners: calm, patient, soft-spoken, supportive. Maggie had never been happier.
Maggie had invited everyone she knew to the party, and many people she didn’t, thanks to the prodigious connections she now enjoyed as a famous artist. (She tried to make me put quotes around that term, but she had genuinely become a famous artist.)
The elevator doors opened, spilling a new carload of people into the apartment, including one person who stood a head above everyone else. That was my son-in-law, Ravi, a medical resident who had once played semipro basketball in Germany. My eyes traveled down to his shoulder where stood my daughter, Caitlin, as petite as her husband was tall, as fair as he was dark. She and Ravi had announced their pregnancy when I was visiting in December, for Maggie’s and my joint birthday and the winter holidays. Caitlin had been barely pregnant then and had looked more drawn than full, but I caught my breath now when she whispered something in Ravi’s ear and I saw her distinctly rounded belly. My little baby, expecting a baby.
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