A delightful Midlife Author interview with Daisy Alpert Florin

Plus a coming-of-age, love-and-romance, big-mistakes reading list.

I wrote my novel throughout my forties and it came out the year I turned 50, and I know I couldn’t have written it a moment sooner. 

—Daisy Florin

Hi friends,

For this month’s Midlife Author interview, we’re going to hear from Daisy Alpert Florin, whose debut novel My Last Innocent Year (Holt) published last year to some pretty stellar reviews.

I got to know Daisy because we’d both written novels with settings loosely based on our alma mater, Dartmouth College (though My Last Innocent Year is set in the mid-’90s, and The Wrong Kind of Woman is set in 1970).

My Last Innocent Year is an immersive novel, a coming-of-age story with an elegiac tone: its narrator, Isabel Rosen, is looking back from the present day to her senior year of college, a year of tumult, grief, and some life-changing (bad) decisions. It’s a novel that’s also full of beautiful place- and time-setting details.

In her NY Times review, Elisabeth Egan called My Last Innocent Year “a heartfelt chronicle of a writer who realizes that her stories about girls with feelings matter every bit as much as the ones written by the guy who annotates The New Yorker…. (the novel)… lands like a refreshing, deep breath—one that made me grateful to be in this century, on the other side of 40, with a whole world built atop a foundation Isabel was just beginning to dig.”

A little more about Daisy: She received graduate degrees from Columbia University and Bank Street Graduate School of Education. She is a recipient of the 2016 Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship at Sarah Lawrence College and was a 2019-20 fellow in the BookEnds novel revision fellowship, where she worked with founding director Susan Scarf Merrell. A native New Yorker, Daisy lives in Connecticut with her family.

On to the Q and A!

Hi Daisy! Tell us about where or when you noticed those first glimmers of writing?

I think I’ve always been a writer even if it didn’t always look that way. In school, I was often told I was a good writer because I wrote good papers and school reports, but I didn’t think there was anything special about that. I come from a family of writers, that is to say people who traffic in words, but no one was a novelist, so I didn’t think that was something I could be. But I always loved to read and was drawn to books and words, theater and music too (fun fact: I’m a musical theater nerd and was in my college a cappella group). After graduating from college with a degree in history, I started working in writing-adjacent fields—journalism, publishing, teaching. Looking back, it all sort of makes sense but I couldn’t see it for the longest time. 

My writing career began when I was 37 and the full-time caregiver of three small children, and I thought I would lose my mind if I didn’t find a way to express myself. It was 2010 and everyone was blogging, so I started one of my own called “Days Like This,” as in “Mama said there’d be days like this.” I think it had about a dozen followers. But that’s where it really started for me.

Talk a little about how you got to fiction and novel-writing from there.

After my blog, I started writing personal essays, first about my kids, then about myself. Over the course of several years, I wrote a series of essays about my college years and when I was finished, I realized there was still more I wanted to say about that time, both personally and culturally so I turned to fiction. Fiction gave me a way to explore a lot of the feelings I had about being in college, about the 90s, about the kind of person I was at the time but it gave me a bigger canvas to explore things that hadn’t happened to me but had happened to people I knew or I could imagine happening. In 2015, I started fiddling around with scenes I thought could be a novel. To my surprise, I just kept going.

What do you know now as a writer that you wish you’d known starting out?

I have a post-it above my desk that says “Frustration isn’t an interruption of the process, it is the process.” So there’s that. Also, I used to think that if something was hard, it meant you weren’t any good. Now I know that everything is hard and it has nothing to do with how good you are so you might as well do the thing you want to do.

….Underneath, I struggled mightily with my inner critic who really says the nastiest things. I’m no good, not smart enough, not well read enough, don’t have the right training or pedigree. Too old, a dilettante, housewife. You get the picture…. I don’t know how I persevered but I think it had something to do with being in my forties and really not giving a crap.

Can you share a challenge you’ve faced with writing, publishing, or both?

Externally, things went rather smoothly for me–I finished my manuscript, found an agent, sold my book (I should say this process took eight years!). But underneath, I struggled mightily with my inner critic who really says the nastiest things. I’m no good, not smart enough, not well read enough, don’t have the right training or pedigree. Too old, a dilettante, housewife. You get the picture. I can’t tell you how many parties I went to over the years where people would either a) not ask me what I did at all, which I sometimes preferred or b) ask me what I did and then look sorry for me when I said “writer.” This went on for a long time. I don’t know how I persevered but I think it had something to do with being in my forties and really not giving a crap. More about that in the next answer….

What makes a midlife writer a stronger writer?

….I know there are lots of preternaturally gifted young writers out there who are born with both the gifts and the chutzpah to just get going. I am not one of them. I am someone who needs a lot of time to process things. I am also a fairly slow writer. Also, I KNOW I would have been far too insecure and externally focused in my twenties (and probably my thirties) to be able to buckle down and do the hard internal work you need to do to get a novel written. I needed the maturity and wisdom that came with age. I also needed to be in a place in my life where I felt very stable in order to go to the crazy places you have to go to write fiction. I wrote my novel throughout my forties and it came out the year I turned 50, and I know I couldn’t have written it a moment sooner. I love reading novels by people (women) in midlife because they have something to say that is of interest to me. I love the grit and ruthlessness of stories by people who maybe feel like they’re running out time (but they’re not!).

Can you share your advice for someone who’s just getting started with writing, or who thinks it’s too late? 

I sure can: It’s not! We’re writers so we don’t need functioning knees. If you told me you wanted to be a figure skater, I might give different advice–but then again I don’t know anything about figure skating so I’m probably not the best person to ask. What I will say is that writing never leaves you. Even if you haven’t written for years, it’s still there for you to tap back into whenever you want. Get started. Be willing to write a lot and throw a lot of it out. Nothing is wasted. 

Tell us about My Last Innocent Year, and if you’re working on a new project, talk a little about that.

My Last Innocent Year (Holt, 2023) is a campus novel set against the loose backdrop of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Isabel Rosen, the daughter of an appetizing store owner from New York’s Lower East Side, is in her final semester at Wilder College, a fictional New Hampshire school modeled on my alma mater–and yours!—Dartmouth when a nonconsensual sexual encounter with a friend leaves her reeling. Then she falls into a love affair with her married writing professor, an experience that introduces her to the messy world of adults at the precise moment she is figuring out how to become one.

As for my new novel, I would say it’s about the fallout of #MeToo on an American family. Alex and Roger are a married couple in their late 40s being forced to grapple with complicated experiences from their pasts as they guide their 14-year-old daughter through a scandal of her own. 

And last, tell us about a book that you think deserves more attention.

I am fully obsessed with Vanessa Cuti’s The Tip Line, which came out last year. Thirty-year-old Virginia Carey is desperate to get married when she lands a job answering the tip line at a Long Island police station. When it turns out the detective she’s dating just might be the serial killer a sex worker keeps calling about, Virginia must decide how far she’s willing to go to get that ring. Pitched as a crime novel, it’s actually so much more, a twisty psychological novel with the ultimate unreliable narrator. Fans of Emma Cline’s The Guest will love it.

Last month’s Midlife Author interview, below.

An Inspiring Midlife Author interview with Ellen Birkett Morris

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More info about these novels here.

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Coming of age, love and romance, a camp-friends saga, and more: A reading list to go with My Last Innocent Year

My Last Innocent Year has been suggested for readers who loved Julia May Jonas’ satirical campus novel Vladimir and Miranda Cowley Heller’s The Paper Palace; but those two novels are over-the-top melodramatic, so here are some other suggestions, some recent and not-so-recent novels that I think pair well with My Last Innocent Year.

The Last Book Party, Karen Dukess

A coming-of-age story set in the ‘80s that shares some of My Last Innocent Year’s looking-back, elegiac vibe. Main character Eve is on Cape Cod for the summer. She’s an editorial assistant doing some work for a famed writer who summers on the Cape, and who hosts a renowned literary party at the end of the summer. Glamour, bad decisions, and an evocative Cape Cod setting.

The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing, Melissa Bank

The Girl’s Guide follows main character Jane from high school through her forties. A voicey novel in stories that perfectly mixes humor and grief. If you’re a Melissa Bank fan, here’s a lovely tribute from another great novelist, Nick Hornby.

The Interestings, Meg Wolitzer

This friendship saga follows a group of camp friends across 40 years, through romances, marriages, breakups, astounding career successes and failures. A crime that one of the group commits adds to the plot and to a late plot twist.

The Female Persuasion, Meg Wolitzer

A young woman’s years-long relationship with her boss, a famous, Gloria Steinem-like feminist. An absorbing, sink-into-it novel (but if you’re only going to pick one Wolitzer novel right now, read The Interestings).

Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher

On the campus-novel spectrum, Dear Committee Members is more on the Richard Russo-Straight Man (or in Netflix terms, The Chair, with Sandra Oh) end than the melodramatic Julia May Jonas Vladimir end. A comic epistolary novel built out of recommendation letters and emails.

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Until next time! Before I go, here’s the view from New Hampshire this month: dramatic clouds before the rain; the last of the Lady of Shallot roses; and our old maples on a green day.