Late bloomers
On the day she decided to quit writing fiction after years of intermittent success, Edmonton novelist Marina Endicott couldn’t stop crying. She was in her forties and had finished her second novel, one she thought no publisher would want, in which “everything that I’d thought or felt or imagined for seven years was stuffed, pruned and burnished.”
She’d already had an earlier career in theatre, and had been shortlisted* for an Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award for her first book, Open Arms. But the slogging never got any easier, and Endicott didn’t think she could justify it anymore, even to her very supportive police officer husband and growing children.
Yet after a talk with her spouse, who told her she was being “ridiculous” to quit what she loved, and one with herself, in which she faced the fact that quitting writing was the last thing she wanted to do, Endicott decided to soldier on.
Good thing. Her novel Good to a Fault, a wonderful evocation of a woman blooming emotionally in midlife, not only found a publisher but was also shortlisted for the 2008 prestigious Giller Prize.
And so, at 50, Endicott found herself feted at the Toronto Giller gala, her book lauded by jury members Margaret Atwood, Bob Rae and Colm Tóibín. Endicott is now by any standards a literary success, and her book is on its way to becoming a bestseller. And it only took her 50 years to get there.
Slow-burning success
You could say she’s a late bloomer. Suddenly, we’re reading a lot about late bloomers. If it isn’t actress Kristin Scott Thomas being celebrated at 48 for her stunning middle-aged turns in two recent French movies and on Broadway, it’s bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell discussing late bloomers in The New Yorker.
Gladwell’s piece drew on the theories of University of Chicago economist David Galenson to explore why some highly creative, successful people burst out of the gate fully formed, immediately in touch with their own brilliance — Picasso, for instance — while others — Galenson used Cézanne as an example — work slowly and iteratively toward their successes, reaching their full potential only in their fifties and beyond.
Gladwell’s point was that we worship white-hot, early professional stardom, but don’t pay enough attention to the slow-burning model of success. It’s true that most sectors, whether it’s finance or law or business, in their Darwinian ruthlessness, demand that we show our colours early. If we don’t, we risk getting slow-tracked, set aside, overlooked. Who in this fast-paced work environment has the time or patience to nurture themselves, thinking that in 20 years or so, their investment will pay off and they’ll finally set the world on fire?
So society undoubtedly misses out on many late bloomers, who, if they were encouraged and supported, would eventually come into their own. Because it’s not that these people have been toiling away in obscurity and are suddenly discovered — it’s that it takes them this long to fully achieve their excellence.
*This article has been corrected from the original copy in More magazine
