See You Later Maybe Never - Lenore Rowntree - Bog

Her name is Vanessa and she's pissed off with getting old. Forced out of her high fashion job in Toronto, Vanessa freewheels into the rapid destruction of her long and comfortable marriage which in turn sends her on a comical retreat to a holistic campus on a far-flung island. There she grapples with being a single, childless woman closing in on sixty who only now realizes that she never finished breaking up with the wild bass player she met in Victoria decades earlier. Forced to confront her past, we see Vanessa as a twelve-year-old playing with crayfish in the ravine while her parents' marriage breaks up and she secretly crushes on the only kid of colour at school, and again as a young teacher in training smitten with one of her students. Then, when she's sixty, Vanessa dates a black man, but has no clue how to be about it, while her ex, in his stained windbreaker and soiled sneakers, is happy to find his match in a Melissa McCarthy double who wears T-shirts with smutty slogans. And finally we meet Vanessa's Aunt Marion who, at 103, still has tricks to make her life more interesting. Intelligent and funny, timeless and tragic, See You Later Maybe Never gets to the heart of what it means to be seen as old in a strange new world.