Charlotte Wood

But that mantra is getting harder and harder to keep up, because a year has gone by

And there's been not a voiceover, not a commercial, nothing.

And she hasn't got any money.

I don't know about that, actually, because...

I mean, the others think she's a bit self-deluded about her.

She's very fit.

She does a lot of yoga.

The house is up these endless flights of stairs and it has an inclinator.

Now, for people who don't know what an inclinator is, it's like a kind of little mini monorail thing that goes up a steep incline in those very steep blocks that people have in some areas where they, especially in the bush, those bushy suburbs, beachside places.

Adele's the only one who runs up and down the stairs, and the others are kind of quietly like, oh, well, Miss Showoff has to run up and down the stairs.

And she's thinking, God, if they only walked up and down the stairs, then they wouldn't have their kind of joint problems and whatever.

Yeah, well, she's not that interested in cleaning out.

You know, I mean, it's quite boring.

So Jude's in there scrubbing the pantry and sorting through every bit of jar of this and that, and Adele ends up just going through the records on the floor and saying, oh, remember this, I love Carly Simon, you know, kind of almost making more mess than cleaning up.

But Adele, you know, you can't sustain those judgements about Adele, actually, through the course of the book.

I feel very protective of her, obviously.

Well, it was a very tricky line for me to walk because I wanted to write about getting older and kind of projecting myself forward into what kind of person will I be when I'm 75 or older.

And I don't know, it would be a combination of all of these women.

But I thought I wanted to write about women who are powerful, who are still living...

life now, not sitting in a chair thinking about the glory days of when they were 20, because they don't feel like that.