Article: As best friends since college...
As best friends since college, we have talked to death nearly every experience that has come our way-college papers, careers, marriage, child-rearing, getting our kids into pre-school one moment and the next, or so it seems, getting them into college. For the last couple of years, our principle topic of conversation has centered around turning 50. Our first step, we figured , was to say out loud to each other: we are 50 and counting. Now what?
Our second step was to look for a book to tell us what to do. We couldn't find "the" book we were looking for. So, we embarked on a journey of research—reading, sharing experiences, trying out exercises-that eventually morphed into our book.
When we started Coming of Age …All Over Again Buffy's daughter was a high school senior. Kate made the connection between the complicated but exhilarating experience Daisy was going through—having her entire life stretched out ahead of her in all its infinite possibility—and what was happening to us, only 30-something years later. The fact is, the possibilities are just as infinite now as they were when we were high school seniors. Now is the time to seize our lives back from jobs, kids, planning for others, doing for others. Now's the time for us-to plan and live the second half of our lives.
People have asked how we collaborate. Kate lives in New York City and Buffy lives in Los Angeles. We collaborate the same way we did on college term papers. We get together and do all-nighters. We get punchy and feel like we are solving the problems of the universe. After college, collaboration was a way to keep the friendship going through the stressful and exciting early days of careers and marriages.
What started as a weekly writing exercise evolved into a novel. It was a potboiler with a Byzantine plot, that the two of us together could only keep track of by committing the plot to 3 by 5 cards. There was a trail of cards snaking around Buffy's study, out into the hallway and halfway down the stairs. We probably spent as much time writing as we did keeping Kate's three old from mixing them up. We sat there, a little daunted by the task before us, but determined. New American Library published Golden Triple Time and our writing careers started. That collaboration gave each of us the confidence to write novels on our own.
We still liked to work together even if on separate projects. One October weekend, we were alone at Kate's house having convinced our husbands to take our two sons on a camping trip. We had been working all night long and were bleary-eyed, giggly and exhausted.
Kate said to Buffy, as she squinted off into the early morning shadows, "Don't look now but there's this black leather butterfly in here."
It was a bat, of course. We screamed and dived under the covers, grabbing a flashlight and a jar of peanuts and kept working there, peering out occasionally to see if the bat had decamped. By sunrise, the bat was gone and we had each written a couple of pages we happily read aloud to each other over coffee. We like that image of us writing under covers hiding from a bat for the kind of focus we try to bring to our collaboration, keeping it alive through life's distractions, whether all hell breaking loose at work or a kid in crisis, or a bat loose in the house.
We hope our latest collaboration, will encourage Boomers everywhere to get together, like we did, and figure out together how to live the second half of our lives with style, wit, and a dash of imagination. We can do it!