“I think it’s a fantastic time to be perfectly honest. I would hand-on-heart say that I am happier in this decade of my life than I’ve been in any other single decade of my life. I genuinely mean that,” says author, playwright and Irish Times columnist, Hilary Fannin.
The 54-year-old, who regularly writes about issues around aging, says she is more relaxed about life now than she was in her thirties or forties.
“I’m certainly less panicked about things: What will I do with myself? What am I going to do about my life? How am I going to make a living? Some of those things have been sorted out,” she told Róisín Ingle, presenter of the Róisín Meets podcast.
Middle-age is being spoken about in a more positive way now, says Fannin, because there is a sense of possibility and new beginnings about entering your fifties that wasn’t there for previous generations.
“I’m very much looking forward to the next 20 years and then I’m going to go to bed and watch soap operas and eat,” she said.
Fannin’s memoir, Hopscotch, has just been released on paperback. It is a snapshot of her childhood “days in suburbia”, taking place when she was four to 10 years old.
In it she talks about her father’s long-term extra-marital affair, which she was privy to as a child. She describes him as “a character, with faults”, who she was very close to up until his death. As a child, his affair went over her head in a way.
“I don’t think I understood betrayal. I don’t know if I really understood at that age the consequences of his actions. He was a very exotic creature whom I loved,” she said.
Fannin’s artist father and actress mother were, she says, “beautiful people who met in art college and had a blast.”
They married young because they wanted to sleep with each other and in 1960s Ireland, you had to be married to do that. They had three children very quickly and because of this she says she can’t judge her father harshly for having an affair.
“If I’m to judge him or her by the standards that I would apply to myself or to my era, as writer anyway, I’m making an error. I need to look at them in the context of their time and you know, they did the best they could. They stayed together until he died,” she said.
Fannin says she has few regrets in life herself, but if there is one it’s that she didn’t go to college. She may live the student-life yet though.
“I would really love to have gone to college. I would love to have been a student. And you know what? It’s not too late.”
Hopscotch by Hilary Fannin is available on paperback now.
