At 61, after a decade writing four unpublished manuscripts and receiving hundreds of rejections from agents and publishers, Melanie Cantor got an email in 2019 from the literary agent Felicity Blunt. “It started off positively and I was just waiting for the ‘but’ to arrive, but it never did,” Cantor says. “She said she wanted to represent me.”
In 2020, Dorset-based Cantor’s debut novel Life and Other Happy Endings, about a woman with three months to live who spends her remaining time writing letters to those who have wronged her, came out. Its publication was the culmination of a lifelong fascination with writing.
“My father was an artist and even though I couldn’t draw for toffee, words were my creativity,” she says. “I used to write stories and poetry. When I was given a guitar at 15, I even wrote songs. I never thought being a writer was possible, though, since the only option if you were good at English in the 60s was to become a teacher.”
Rather than work in education, Cantor became a secretary for the theatre publicist Peter Thompson and developed her own roster of clients. In the 90s, she made the switch to talent management, founding her own agency that represented everyone from Michael Parkinson to Ulrika Jonsson and Adam Ant. Yet by 2008, she was becoming disillusioned and decided to take a new direction.
“The industry had moved towards reality TV and I just wasn’t as passionate about work any more,” she says. “I had just turned 50 and having spent so long working on other people’s interests, it was time to do something for me. I decided to get back to writing.”
Aside from a manuscript in 2001, after being inspired by the bestselling comedy novel The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, Cantor hadn’t written anything long-form since she was a teenager. She decided to enrol on a writing course to hone her skills. “I spent five days in Oxford and it was eye-opening,” she says. “We had to read out the pages we wrote every day. It was so embarrassing when it got to me because mine wasn’t poetic like the others. But I did make everyone laugh.”
After meeting an agent through the course, Cantor was encouraged to write a manuscript that focused on the celebrity world she had worked in. “It almost got picked up by HarperCollins but failed in the sales and marketing tests and that was devastating,” she says. “I went out and got drunk and met someone who told me: ‘Rejection is what makes you a writer.’ I’d learn that over the next decade!”
Drawn to creating characters and plotlines, Cantor wrote every day, regardless of the rejections, with her dog Mabel by her side. “Writing brought me such pleasure,” she says. “Even if it was just for myself, I loved living with these characters and when I wrote it was so meditative, I would lose track of time. It’s only when I finished a draft and pressed send – to an agent – that it got scary.”
Cantor produced three more manuscripts before she began working with a freelance editor, who helped shape Life and Other Happy Endings. It was published, however, as the Covid pandemic hit and she was unable to attend any events to meet readers. Happily, her follow-up comic novel, The F**k It List, which recounts a new start for a 40-year-old single woman who decides to become a mother, is about to be published.
“I’m so excited to connect with the readers and keep telling these stories of powerful, independent women,” she says. “Not everyone will like your work but I’m so thrilled to be able to entertain the people who engage with it. It makes all that rejection worth it.”
Now 66, Cantor is working on her third novel and a screenplay adaptation of The F**k It List that she is hoping will get picked up. “Now that I’ve started, I won’t stop,” she says. “I want to show people that failure is simply part of the journey of life. If you keep going, time, luck and talent will combine in your favour.”
The F**K It List by Melanie Cantor is published by Penguin on 9 May (£8.99).
Tell us: has your life taken a new direction after the age of 60? Fill in the online form at theguardian.com/new-start-after-60