Kathy Lette: ‘I was told nobody wants to read about middle-aged women’

Bestselling Australian author said she was told by an agent that middle-aged women weren’t ‘sexy’

Australian author Kathy Lette has revealed how she has struggled to get the publishing industry to take interest in stories about middle-aged women.

The writer, 66, was speaking at the 2025 Hay Festival of Literature and Arts, which has partnered with The Independent for the second year running.

Lette had her first novel, Puberty Blues, published in Australia at the age of 17 and has since written more than 20 books, which have been translated into 19 languages.

Her latest novel, The Revenge Club, tells the story of a group of four middle-aged women “taking revenge on the men who’d sabotaged their careers for the crime of being middle-aged”, she told comedian and writer Ruby Wax during an event on Wednesday (28 May) afternoon.

However, on sharing her plans for the book, Lette claimed she was told that “nobody wants to read about” that demographic.

Lette said that the period after menopause is the ‘best time of a woman’s life’ (Billie Charity/Hay Festival)

“My agent at the time said, ‘nobody wants to read about middle-aged women, they’re just not sexy,’” she said.

“And then a publisher said to me, ‘Middle-aged women, they’re like Sudan and Mogadishu. We know they exist but nobody wants to go there.’ And then my publisher dropped me because I was too old, and I thought, maybe I have passed my ‘amused by’ date.”

When her book became a success, hitting the number one spot in Australia, she said that she “made sure to send the reviews to the publishers who rejected me”.

Lette said that the period after menopause is “the best time of a woman’s life” because they “no longer care” about the opinions of others.

Lette was interviewed by her long-time friend Ruby Wax (Billie Charity/Hay Festival)

“I think for women, life is in two acts,” she explained. “The trick is surviving the menopause, which is awful. You swear more than Donald Trump doing a sudoku.”

Women, Lette added, “are brought up to be decorative and demure”, but “once you get to 50, you get a kind of ‘f*** it, I’m 50’ gene, where you no longer care”.

The Hay Festival is being held in partnership with The Independent for the second year running.

Over the course of the festival, The Independent is hosting The News Review, a series of morning panels which sees our journalists discuss the latest headlines with figures from the arts, politics, science and comedy.