IS BOOMER LIT THE NEW BIG THING?

 

 

Sandra, my best friend, always surprises me in where she goes mentally and physically.

Some time back she emailed me that Boomer Lit will be the

next BIG THING
 
and that I wrote one of its first books years ago.

BOOMER LIT?

Those who were born with the bomb are now a huge chunk of the population with disposable income ...

and who still do that quaint thing called ...

READING.

From ABOUT SCHMIDT to REDS 2 (retired spies dealing badly with mortality and being shelved by life)

to SKYFALL (the weathered James Bond and the haunted M dealing with regrets and mortality) ...

Recent movies are directing their attention to those facing grim questions and seeking relief and entertainment.

Baby Boomer novels address

“coming of old age” issues

just as Young Adult novels
are concerned with just coming of age.

The word “age,” or “aging,” used to scare marketers
intent on targeting the young,
but no more.

With a huge and growing market of some 70 million boomers — technically, all those born
between 1946 and 1964 —

As I've written above, Hollywood was the first to notice the change in its audience.

You can probably think of even more movies ... such as  
HOPE SPRINGS or THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL.

BOOMER LIT is a moving feast that can accommodate all kinds of sub-genres,

from light comedy to tragedy, from romance to thrillers, and more.

Which brings us back to Sandra ...

She points to Samuel McCord, the eternal 50 year old,
dealing with increasing physical pains,
the loss of old friends, a broken marriage,
and the loss of his childhood faith in God ...

against a backdrop of supernatural horror and natural disaster:

To look at me you might think me nothing more than a freshly-minted fifty year old man with a taste for black Stetsons.  You’d be wrong on two counts.  I was at least two hundred and five years old.  And I was a monster.  I caught myself listening for the angry villagers with torches in their hands.  This was certainly the night for it.

          As if to deny the monster that I was, I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the scents and sounds of the three gifts from my wife for whom my club was named.  I opened my eyes and smiled sad.  Her gifts still remained though she had left me seven years ago.

          Seven years.  It seemed a lifetime.  An empty, lonely lifetime.

          The good thing about having lived the life I had was that I'd had two hundred years to get used to things going badly.  And they always did, humans being what they were.  Yet, I survived.  The bitter voice of my loneliness asked me why I bothered.  I had no answers.  Just questions.  Questions in the dark.  Story of my life.

          When they came for me tonight, would I struggle?  I made a face.  I knew I would.  Not just out of reflex.  Too many innocents depended upon me being there to stand between them and the hungry wolves.

          And then, there was my hope and my need.

          There is a need in Man, even such a man as me, to see himself.  Fortunately, not in mirrors, for I am denied that.  No, not in mirrors, but in the words of others.  A bridge of words between the solitary confinement of one mind to another.  It is the link to the common spirit within us all.

          I lost that link.  I lost Meilori.  I lost my light.  And I could no longer see my way clear.  I walked by hope alone.  Hope that one day around some dark corner, I would find Meilori waiting for me, having forgiven me when I could no longer forgive myself.

 

What do you think? Is BOOMER LIT the next trend?