“The two characters that I have written who are older are Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton. It’s interesting because as I wrote them it was their character that was most important to me, and their age was simply a piece of that character. So even though I knew I was writing about older people I didn’t think about that in a way, except to make sure they were always who they were.”

Lisa Gornick, “Writing ‘Women of a Certain Age’: A Roundtable on Crafting Older Female Characters in Fiction: Lisa Gornick Hosts a Conversation with Julia Alvarez, Fiona Davis, Andrea Lee, and Elizabeth Strout” LitHub, November 27, 2023.