Charlotte Wood

vulnerable, I mean they are all very vulnerable, but not sort of frail, victim-y, and not only mothers, which I think in many depictions of older age in popular culture, old women are mothers or grandmothers or lying in a nursing home or, you know, on the deathbed.

Yes, and they haven't been necessarily very culturally powerful in their younger lives.

So I wanted to look at the kind of loss of cultural power that comes, not because the person who holds that power is any less powerful in themselves, but because we as a culture have decided that it's time for you to shut up now.

So I wanted them to...

to be powerful people who haven't quite realized that their power has waned and almost they haven't really noticed that it is and it's kind of quite a shock when every now and again they find themselves sort of insulted in some way by somebody who doesn't know who they are like jude in a restaurant for example so jude has been a restaurateur she's been powerful she's still got

She has the trappings of... She has money because I'm not sure if I mentioned before that Jude has been having a relationship with a married man called Daniel for around about 40 years, the same period of time she's been friends with these women.

Daniel's got loads of money.

So Jude hasn't worked for quite some time, but the money, I think, I can't remember which one of the other women says, the money sort of washes in and out like a tide from Jude's life because Daniel thinks new couches and...

bottles of champagne and things turn up and then other things go away and turn up.

But Jude is very comfortably off.

Well, I love Jude.

She's not very lovable, but it's been very fascinating to me as my friends had started to read this book and they sent me text messages and one of them was my friend Carolyn, who's extremely organised and very efficient, and she said...

you know, I love this book, blah, blah.

And she said, I mean, there's nothing wrong with Jude.

She just wants things to work properly.

And also Wendy, I mean, if she just got a hot oil treatment or something, just a pedicure, something, you know, she should sort herself out.

Anyway, so Jude is very loving in her actions, but she virtually cannot speak a loving word.

You know, she feels very deeply.

She's very admiring of Wendy, for example, of all the amazing things she's achieved.

But of course, Wendy has brought along with her her ailing and decrepit and demented incontinent dog, which for someone like Jude is just beyond the pale to bring this dog to a place where they're cleaning it up and blah, blah, blah.