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

There is a reason, of course, why this theory is suddenly so popular. Many baby boomers are now painfully realizing they haven’t achieved all their dreams; that at 50, it isn’t about their promise or potential anymore, that the time to be the new kid on the block has come and gone. No wonder, then, that so many of us are fervently hoping there will indeed be a late or at least another flowering.

Consider what happened when I phoned a Toronto bookstore asking about books on late bloomers. Said the woman on the other end of the line, her voice brightening: “I’m kind of hoping I’m a late bloomer.” Aren’t we all?

The idea of becoming a professional success later in life is even more attractive to women, who, as Marina Endicott wisely points out, often find what they love to do — and what they are excellent at — later in life because “they’ve been tending other gardens.” That would be their children, the demands of family life or marriage, or perhaps for some it was a decision to stop working for a while, or to take a job that was financially crucial but never spoke to the heart. So it may be that women are, of necessity, late bloomers.

Defining a late bloomer

I didn’t really consider myself a late bloomer until I started researching the subject. After all, I burst out of the gate in my early twenties and have been working steadily on my craft ever since. And while I no longer daydream that I am suddenly going to turn around and write an Oscar-winning screenplay, I do still dream of scaling new heights. But I now think — in contrast to what I believed when I was brash and young — it takes a very long time to get good at what you do. (That’s another Gladwell-promoted theory, by the way — that you need at least 10,000 hours to be first rate at your job.) And in that sense, we may all be late bloomers. Recently, to my surprise, I noted how much easier my work has become. Thinking is hard and writing is always a challenge, but I’ve now got the necessary tools, experience and confidence to just keep going. That’s one of the many unheralded joys of working in one’s fifties at the same thing one did in one’s twenties. The brain — and the heart — recognizes that this is something it knows how to do. Now the object is not to prove you can do it but instead to just get better and better.

I approached a variety of women to ask if they consider themselves late bloomers, and I discovered it is not always a compliment to be labelled as such. The inference is that those early years were wasted or were at least unproductive. One woman I know, a highly successful corporate facilitator in her early sixties, replied, “If late bloomer means not having had great work and great responsibility in my early working years, then I am not a late bloomer. I had way too much responsibility way too early. But if it means becoming wiser, more realistic and still idealistic, then that is me — the wiser part blooming in the last few years and still but a bud.”

According to Toronto executive coach Helen Ryane, especially in the corporate world, a late bloomer “is sometimes looked on with suspicion, someone who may not quite have her act together or has spent too much time tilting at windmills.” And in truth this suspicion is justified by the fact that some people are never going to blossom no matter how they are nurtured. Still, her advice to bosses is to recognize that some people just need more time before they find the right fit, the right boss and the right way to develop their skills. Late bloomers in turn have to persevere, believe in themselves and “stay in touch with their own creativity.”

Having supportive friends and family is perhaps the most crucial requirement, she says, even if those who love you “secretly wish the process wouldn’t take quite so long.” Ryane, who has worked with top executives and highly creative people all over North America, firmly believes “people in their forties, fifties or sixties can become shooting stars.”

In Good to a Fault, Marina Endicott’s unforgettable heroine is Clara Purdy, a divorced, financially independent, childless woman in her forties who does something astounding: After her car collides with another beat-up auto filled with a down-on-their-luck family living out of their now demolished car, she decides to take them in and look after the young children while their mother is in hospital battling a serious illness. In doing so, she courts social disapproval for being recklessly and even selfishly “good.” But in the midst of the kind of domestic family chaos she never thought would be hers, Clara blossoms, becoming more herself than she ever was before.

Growing into our true selves, whether in our work or our personal lives, is a powerful concept. Endicott talks of “lengthening your stride” and of a process “of maturing…trying to come to grips with things, passing on those easy jumps.” 

The disadvantages of being a late bloomer are obvious. There’s the loneliness of the long struggle, and the very real peril — if you don’t have luck and support on your side — of missing the boat completely. Being one also starkly underscores the difference between, as Endicott says, “someone who struggles and someone who gets to do it right the first time.” In other words, the perils of wasting time — all that time gone and no way to get it back. And finally, trite but true: Why couldn’t all this success have happened when they didn’t have to Photoshop the wrinkles out of your headshot?

But think also of the advantages: You’ve waited so long to get it right, to be a success, that you’re less likely to blow it when you get there. You are, by sheer dint of all that hard work and years of experience, more humble and infinitely more grateful for the blessings that finally do come your way. You’ve had years to study your field and you have a pretty focused sense of what contribution you want to make and, now that you’re really cooking, how to get there. You may have already shored up your personal life while you were waiting for your moment. And now you’re filled with a kind of ebullient work energy and drive that twentysomethings can only dream of.

In fact, I can think of only one thing better than being a late bloomer. That would be being a perennial, of course.

It's not too late to bloom: Meet midlife women who went back to school after a successful career!

This article originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of More