Tina Foster talks to bestselling author Hilary Boyd about relationships, love and sex in later life
With her new book published this month Meet Me on the Beach, novelist Hilary Boyd is continuing to write about marriage and relationships in later life. Her first novel Thursdays in the Park hit the bestsellers list and has become well known for its theme of love and sex in the over 60s. The media dubbed it “gran-lit” and she was known as the women who put ‘sex into sexagenarian’.
Despite all the hype about her inclusion of sex in her novels, Boyd writes a proper account of how life actually is as you get older. Hilary celebrates the fact that you can still have a full romantic relationship including sex and more devastatingly, falling in love.
I first met Hilary last year when we discussed her writing and the themes of long marriage and family compromises. She has been married for over 40 years and has survived the stormy seas of matrimony.
Hilary was born in North Wales and educated at Roedean. She trained as a nurse and worked at Great Ormond Street. What could be termed as her ‘middle class’ upbringing is perhaps alienating to younger readers, but to me it is helpful in explaining some of the difficulties that our generation has in tolerating the modern acceptance of illegitimacy, homosexuality and sexual freedom.
During her career she worked as a Marriage Guidance Counsellor and a health journalist as well as publishing books on step-parenting, depression and pregnancy all of which she handles in her novels with great solicitude.
Meet me on the Beach follows the story of Karen who at 57 finds herself a widow with a spoilt step-daughter and a huge burden of guilt. Karen has had to cope with a difficult older husband who has become a bullying alcoholic and then, after his death, the pain of falling in love with someone else who is not available.
Hilary again tackles the problems that many of us have encountered within families with a gentle understanding that some issues cannot be dealt with easily and there is not always a happy ending, but we can learn to cope with acceptance and compromise.
The subject of relationships, love and sex is one that Mature Times has researched and written about producing a Guide in conjunction with Relate. As deputy editor of the monthly paper I have received many calls and letter concerning loneliness and the need for older people to make friends and liaisons with both sexes.
Just because we get older the need for love does not diminish and while we have our families and often the pleasure of grandchildren, there is no substitute to having someone special to share your pleasures with.
If you are lucky enough to find someone special and between you find a comfortable way of being together – not everyone wants to live together so don’t feel you have to share everything in your life including your residence – you’ll then discover that, unless you are very lucky, not everyone else in your life maybe quite so understanding.
There are usually problems with families on both sides as we almost all have responsibilities from previous relationships to juggle. The older you are the more baggage will normally surround you, children, stepchildren, finance, in-laws, illness, and geography, all these things may cause friction and that is outside your relationship. Inside it you will have your own issues like where do you sleep, when and what you eat, what films you like, religion and cultural differences. Sometimes you may wonder if it is all worth it.
If you meet and fall in love in your teens and twenties most of these matters are not important, but as we get older and more set in our ways they have to be addressed.
Meet me on the Beach is published by Quercus ISBN: 9781782067948 and is available as a Kindle, hardback and paperback edition. 
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If you’d like more help with relationships in your life, why not order a copy of our Mature Guide to relationships, love and sex by Barbara Bloomfield supported by Relate, the relationship people at a special rate of £7.95 including p+p (normally £9.95) by quoting MAP15. Offer closes 30th November 2015
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