An 86-year-old great-great-grandmother has become a first-time novelist by writing a raunchy romance novel about a bored housewife.
In a radio interview with KUTV, Georgia Gorringe said it took her half a decade to pen the tale of a woman who listens to talk radio and is turned on by the voice of a man she hears.
“And that voice on the radio, oh, he had a magic voice! And it just turned her on!” Gorringe said.
While Gorringe’s daughter Bobbie Posey told the radio station she was proud of her mother’s foray into fiction, she did admit to being a bit startled by the steamy subject matter.
“Sometimes I’m like, mother, how could you do that? How can you write that?” Posey told KUTV. “But she did!”
The book, titled No Good-bye, is a 176-page light read and is attributed to Gorringe’s pen alias, Georgie Marie and has been picked up by Amazon.com.
“Sometimes, the sound of a voice is all it takes to dial up a fine romance,” reads the tease from the etailer. “But can you really fall in love with someone when you have never been in the same room?”
While the novice insists the story is all made up, her daughter says there is truth behind the the tale.
“A lot of it is actually real-life,” said Posey. “I mean, we know who she’s talking about.”
Gorringe isn’t the only person to publish her first book later in life.
While the book world often seems obsessed with the work of youthful wunderkinds, there have been some late literary bloomers who weren’t published until well into their adult lives – and without them and their ideas the world might be a different place.
Here are seven authors who prove it’s never too late to consider a writing career.
Great-great-grandmother Georgia Gorringe has become a first-time novelist by writing a raunchy romance novel about a bored housewife.
Helen DeWitt’s debut novel, The Last Samurai, was published in 2000, when the author was 44.
Classical American writer Laura Ingalls Wilder was 64 when she published Little House in the Big Woods.
American Harriet Doerr published her first novel, Stones for Ibarra, at the ripe young age of 73 for which she nabbed the National Book Award for First Work of Fiction in 1984.
Raymond Chandler began writing after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. The Big Sleep was published when Chandler was 51.
While he had a small foray into writing in his 20’s, lowlife laureate Charles Bukowski quit his post office job at the age of 51 and published his first novel, Post Office, in 1971.
While his maiden novel The Devil All the Time, published in 2011, was hailed a success and helped him nab a Guggenheim fellowship, Donald Ray Pollock was actually in his mid-50’s when the book went to print.
