Exactly 10 years ago this week, I wrote a column on a remarkable woman named Hilda Lassalette. She had just published her first romance novel, and was four chapters into her second, in what she envisioned would be a trilogy.
She had high aspirations for a woman who was about to celebrate her 97th birthday.
“I might need a little help from upstairs to finish them,” Hilda laughed.
Too often in this job you don’t get the chance to finish the story. You never make it to the “what happened next?” part because you have to move on to other columns.
Ten years was long enough to wait for “what happened next?” with Hilda Lassalette.
She tried to hide her age when she started writing seriously in her 90s, figuring young people wouldn’t want to read a romance novel written by someone old enough to be their great-grandmother.
She was wrong. “Fishing for Love” sold well enough for her independent press publisher to ask for a second book. Readers cared more about a well-written story they could escape into and characters they could relate to, then they did about the age of the author, she found.
A good love story had no age limit, no shelf life.
“I chose romance novels because I like reading them,” she told me. “I bounce ideas off other writers and they critique them. Like the one I’m working on now. They think I have to give the hero and the girl more time together in the first chapter. I’m reworking it.
“A lot of people can’t believe I’m writing romance novels at my age. They think I should be sitting in a rocking chair knitting. Well, that’s not going to happen.”
And that’s where the column ended 10 years ago.
Hilda died last year at 105. She had 98 wonderful years, her daughter said, leaving it at that. The last years were tough. They often are.
Hilda never did give the hero and girl more time together in the first chapter or finish her trilogy.
She took a break from romance to finish a book she had started about a young…
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