Pepper Mills didn’t choose to stop driving or to movie into Vista View Retirement Community. Those were the choices of her adult children. But, opting to make the best of it, she begins to make friends and even starts up a romantic connection with her handsome neighbour. Then, just as she is settling into her new life, Pepper finds out that she’s pregnant. At the age of 77.
When the news becomes public, everyone has an opinion. Some say it’s a miracle, some say it’s gross that a septuagenarian would be sexually active. And it turns out that this is another thing that Pepper doesn’t get a say about when it turns out that the state of Texas has determined that she must carry this pregnancy to term. This is a story about body autonomy and women’s rights, but it’s also a story about family. It’s a story about thinking your life will go one way, or that the major moments of your life are behind you, and then learning to pivot entirely.
Pepper is charming as our heroine and narrator. She’s sassy and funny and curious about the world around her. We get to see her with her adult children – two daughters and a son – and with her grandchildren, particularly her eldest granddaughter, Lola. Frankel does an excellent job at creating unique relationships between Pepper and each of these characters so that they really feel like genuine people.
Frankel also doesn’t lean into easy answers. Women’s health and fertility is complex. Pregnancy is miraculous and terrifying. Some women long to have children and some women die due to pregnancy and birth complications. As a woman with my own history of complicated pregnancies, I’m also someone who now, at 40, would be dismayed to find myself pregnant. Frankel uses an absurd situation to explore some real life situations and complex questions that many women are finding themselves in even now.
The title of the book comes from the short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. A former English teacher, Pepper thinks of this story where a miracle appears in a manner that many find grotesque. It’s a great image and reference for this story of unexpected, unwanted pregnancy and what can be made from a miracle like this.
Karissa Reads Books 
Good gravy 😵💫 I do find it wild when I hear that a person is pregnant in their forties, especially by choice. I’m tired now just being myself. I can’t imagine making another human and then having to care for it for at least 18 years because the law says I have to.
I feel like there’s this uptick of celebrities getting pregnant in their 40s and honestly, it feels deceptive to me to act like that’s the same as being pregnant in your 20s or 30s. I get that there are women who maybe wanted to have babies younger and weren’t able to and I’m glad there are options for them. But I think it’s unrealistic to tell women they can wait and it will all be the exact same. I think we need to be more realistic and honest about just how hard pregnancy is on your body. Part of the horror of this book is that a 70+ woman’s body is not made for pregnancy anymore and yet she has no other option but to see it through.
That’s a good point about celebrities making it look easy. I think people also ignore the fact that the older a woman is when she is pregnant, the higher the risk for cognitive disabilities in the infant. Is that fair to the infant? Is it fair of me to even ask? Complicated stuff.
That’s an often neglected aspect too! And the age of the father also matters more than we used to think. That’s something this book doesn’t address at all which seemed strange to me because it seemed like an obvious and fairly major concern to me.
Interesting choice from the author to combine the loss of autonomy that comes with pregnancy and the loss of autonomy that comes from getting older. I have a friend at church who is eighty. She spent the past several decades caring for her mum, who lived to 103 with bad health, as well as her husband, who had dementia. They died within a few months of each other a couple of years back. Once she had spent some time grieving she was all ready to enjoy her new lease of life, only for her children to start in with well-intended restrictions on what she could and couldn’t do!
(Thankfully she did eventually tell them where to shove it and went off to do her dream river cruise up the Danube, but it was such an insight into the lack of autonomy that can come with getting older).
Yes, those parallels are well done here and interesting to observe. We don’t get to see much of Pepper’s life before she moves to the retirement home but there is definitely this element of she’s spent most of her life catering to other people’s desires and I think that’s familiar for a lot of people, especially women. I’m glad your friend got to take her cruise!
[…] Enormous Wings – Laurie Frankel (Henry Holt and Company, 2026) […]