BOOKS-BOOK-DISGRACEFULLY-REVIEW-MCT

Clare Pooley’s writing career began with her last sip of wine.

To cope with the monumental decision to quit drinking and a cancer diagnosis, the one-time advertising executive turned full-time mother of three started blogging anonymously as SoberMummy. When her blog, “Mummy was a Secret Drinker,” was spun into a book in 2017 (“Sober Diaries”), an author was born.

Pooley could have continued down the self-help track, but she jumped into fiction instead. Her next book, “The Authenticity Project,” corrals a group of people who find friendship through a journal left at a coffee shop. “Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting” brings together strangers via a commuter train, and in Pooley’s latest, “How to Age Disgracefully,” a club is the impetus for disparate seniors to get to know each other.

Are you sensing a pattern?

Pooley is all about creating community, and an inclusive one at that. Older, young, rich, poor, gay, straight and all races. She creates a reason for the characters to come together and then they interact in sometimes comical but always satisfying ways. No one is left without an appropriate denouement.

In “How to Age Disgracefully” the ball gets rolling when newly minted 70-year-old Daphne decides it’s time to leave the confines of her London flat — a beautiful one that looks out on the Thames — and interact with the world again. For 15 years, she’s kept to herself, “utterly alone, stalking her neighbors [on OurNeigbhors.com] and talking to her plants. Except for the yucca, which she’d never entirely trusted.” A plan is in order, so she shrugs on a coat, grabs a handbag and goes shopping for a whiteboard.

Eventually, she makes her way to the Senior Citizens Social Club at the Mandel Community Center, as do Art, an actor; William, a former paparazzo; Pauline, a retired headmistress; Ruby, an inveterate knitter; and Anna, an erstwhile truck driver.

And then there’s Lydia, who took the part-time job of running the club after being a stay-at-home mum for many years: She “had spent the weekend reading ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,’ in preparation for her new job, but she still felt completely out of her depth, and not the slightest effective. Thank goodness she was British and could resort to the tradition of tea-making when the going got a little tough.”

And the going does get tough. Lives upend, as does the community center itself when it suffers a calamity that puts the club in jeopardy. The members rally, of course, and how they go about trying to save the center is amusing reading, enhanced by Pooley’s breezy style often peppered with Americanisms — someone pleads the “Fifth Amendment,” for instance.

What Pooley does best is create a club full of likable, fun-loving characters — Truth or Dare Jenga, anyone? — who are easy to root for. Just the kind of club many readers would be happy to join.

Bestsellers from Publishers Weekly

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. “The Women: A Novel” by Kristin Hannah

2. “Swan Song” by Elin Hilderbrand

3. “All the Colors of the Dark” by Chris Whitaker

4. “Eruption” by Michael Crichton and James Patterson

5. “Resurrection” by Danielle Steel

6. “Camino Ghosts: A Novel” by John Grisham

7. “You Like It Darker: Stories” by Stephen King

8. “Funny Story” by Emily Henry

9. “The Midnight Feast: A Novel” by Lucy Foley

10. “Iron Flame” by Rebecca Yarros

HARDCOVER NONFICTION

1. “Democracy or Else: How to Save America in 10 Easy Steps” by Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor

2. “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service” by Anthony Fauci

3. “The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge With AI” by Ray Kurzweil

4. “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” by Jonathan Haidt

5. “The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War” by Erik Larson

6. “Lies I Taught in Medical School: How Conventional Medicine Is Making You Sicker and What You Can Do to Save Your Own Life” by Robert Lufkin

7. “What This Comedian Said Will Shock You” by Bill Maher

8. “Love & Whiskey: The Remarkable True Story of Jack Daniel, His Master Distiller Nearest Green, and the Improbable Rise of Uncle Nearest” by Fawn Weaver

9. “A Very Chinese Cookbook: 100 Recipes from China and Not China (But Still Really Chinese)” by Kevin Pang and Jeffrey Pang

10. “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free” by Pete Hegseth