Who is Jinny? Writing a main character

My third novel, Life: Immaterial, is about a forty-something year old woman called Jinny who is divorced with children who have left home. She lives with her partner in a large house and works as an executive. She is unhappy and intense to begin with, but after the murder of her mother, she undergoes a transformation into someone who knows more about less.

Hmmm. Forty-something year old who lives with her partner? Divorced, eh? When you put it like that she sounds exactly like me. But Jinny is not me. She is someone I made up in my imagination. Some of the ideals she holds are the opposite to my own. My mother is very much alive, and so is my father. Jinny lives in London. I live in Manchester. Jinny is dark haired and I am flame haired. No, Jinny is not me.

Juliet, another forty-something year old woman in my first novel, Dirty Sparkle, sounds even more like me. A by-product of the Hacienda generation, Juliet struggles through every day guarding a secret even from herself. But Juliet is not me either. She is an entirely fictional character.

So why the fascination with writing forty-something year old MC’s? I think it’s something to do with a graph I saw in a tabloid paper in June 2006. The article was about the ‘menopause test’ which was represented in the press as a pregnancy test-like wand that could count your ovaries. It turned out, at the source, to be an invasive technique based on vaginal ultrasound that was originally devised for women who had undergone chemo and radio therapy and had their ovaries depleted. It was meant for use by oncologists to help these women ascertain their fertility, but the press mangled this into a test that every woman could do in their own front room to see how near they were to the menopause.

The article indicated that the biological clock was ticking and it stopped at the menopause, suggesting some kind of death at that phase of a woman’s life. Indeed, the graph that showed a woman’s life in terms of usefulness tailed off at around forty five year old as the line indicator disappeared. This confirmed the reams of research indicating that women become invisible in middle age.

But my main characters are not invisible. They are viable women with a strong viewpoint. Sure, they have ‘issues’, but who doesn’t after forty years of lived experience? Who will read them? Like everything, it’s a matter of personal taste. In an ever-aging population, the shelf life of such main characters is long. Not all middle aged women seek out twenty-something shoppers as main characters. Some middle aged women have grown children and prefer to read about other people whose interests lie outside shoes, kids and boyfriends. Ordinary women read ordinary women?

My main characters, Jinny, Juliet and Rita Calendar, all cast in very different roles in very different novels, need little introduction. They contain elements of the commonalities of identity. Jinny in particular has raised debate: How can a woman not like her adult children? How can she be so estranged from her mother? How can she bottle her feelings for years? How on earth can she think so deeply?

Similarly, Juliet caused a storm. Semi-alcoholic, Juliet is Bridget gone-too-far, a portrait of binge drinking ten years on. Her love life is a washed out cliche of love songs playing over and over again. Her almost unmanageable existence is tinged with tragedy to the end.

Rita, although younger, is the over-responsible partner of a weak man who eventually leaves her for someone more. Rita continues with their fantasy life with tragic results.

Not so happy-ever-after for my main characters. But rather than leave my readers with a satisfied smile and a warm glow, I would leave them with lingering debate and an examination of their own conscience. Why? Because although Jinny, Juliet and Rita are not me, they are a little bit of all of us, the bits we don’t like to talk about and often deny.

Invisible? No.

Uncomfortable? Yes.

Shallow? No.

Readable? Yes.