Monday 20 August 2007
Saturday 4 August 2007
Forty-fied press kit
ICON BOOKS PRESS RELEASE 11TH JUNE 2007
Published 6th September 2007
From the bestselling author of last year’s
I Hate the Office comes a must-have guide to being in your forties in the noughties …
Malcolm Burgess – journalist, scriptwriter and full-time forty-something – presents a riotous A – Z of the realities of fortysomething life today. Riotous, that is, like having your iPod on in the house.
Today’s fortysomethings have never had it so good – or so confusing. While our parents could look forward to a sensible middle age we’re more likely to be playing our Morrissey records and thanking God Jonathan Ross is on Radio 2. There are so many different ways of being in our forties that many of us aren’t quite sure where we’re supposed to go next – or just how grumpy we’re meant to be.
Forty-fied is the hilariously wry and observant essential guide to this complex decade in our lives. The Metro newspaper columnist and bestselling author of I Hate The Office leaves no embarrassing fortysomething scenario unturned – or do we mean unstoned?
For anyone forty and fabulous, or who’s forty and owns ten fleeces, this is the laugh-loud funny book of your dreams … and no doubt your screams, too.
About the author:
Malcolm Burgess comic series have appeared in The Times, the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine, the Evening Standard and its ES magazine, the Financial Times, the Guardian, and the Metro, in which I Hate the Office, his recent bestselling book, was originally a weekly column, and his current Chalk and Cheese column is proving hugely popular. He worked in book publishing for many years and since ran the Essex Book Festival. He lives near Brentwood and is available for interview.
Forty-fied · The Good, the Bad and the Sad of Fortysomething Life · Malcolm Burgess · Icon Books · 6th September 2007 · B-format hardback · ISBN 978-1840468-23-6
First and second serial rights are available. For more information please contact: Andrew Furlow, Marketing Director, Icon Books andrew.furlow@iconbooks.co.uk / 01763 207158
Please turn over for Malcolm’s Forty-something miscellany …
Six facts about Forty-somethings:
One-third of MySpace users are aged between 35 and 49
47% of podcast consumers are over 35
Soon half of all albums will be bought by people over forty
Model agencies report a 40% increase in demand for over-forty models.
One-third of You Tube users are over 45
The average age of casual video gamers is 41 (and half are women)
Nine Fortysomething ailments:
Mistaken identity - Potentially serious condition by which you believe you are actually much younger than you are. Ages can range from early thirties to as young as six and can be brought on by a wide range of triggers from a quick lunchtime botox to someone telling you you’d like Second Café
Festival Ear - Condition chiefly brought about by not having attended a rock festival for over twenty years. Early signs include the comment ‘why is the music so loud, I don’t remember it being this ear-splitting when we were playing our nose flutes at Glastonbury in 1983. What’s wrong with today’s young people?’
Americana - Faux country and western music whose moaning songs about unsuccessful love, depression and bleak prairie landscapes seem to strike a chord with forty something men.
Anniston, Jennifer - Nearly forty, a fabulous TV career, some decent films and a multi-millionairess … Nearly forty, a series of failed relationships and no children. Only you know how jealous, bitter and twisted you’re feeling today.
Antiques Roadshow, The - The litmus test of advancing middle age. Best to sell it on e-Bay if you can and avoid being publically humiliated as the person who used a Spodewear sugar bowl to keep the rabbits’ rectal thermometer in for twelve years.
Baby Boomers - Whether it’s Bill Clinton doing his post-Presidential thing or Helen Mirren winning Oscars, we can’t help but hear what a fabulous time the ‘Sixties’ generation is having … You, in return, can look forward to working forever, having a pathetic pension, if any, paying for your children’s university education and realising you’ll be about ninety when your mortgage is finally paid.
Barbecues - It is expected that sooner or later the forties man will wish to purchase a barbecue. By succumbing to his ‘inner sausage pricker’ he is answering a call that lies deep in the male psyche to have a burning pyre in his own back garden and to wear a plastic bra and panties apron.
Being Confused - Can someone your age be arrested for going on MySpace? Which focus group from hell came up with Bratz Diamond Sasha? What’s the point of flash mobbing and dancing around a furniture store after work with people you’ve never seen before? Don’t worry, you’re just reaching the foothills or shallow waters of middle age.
Big Tee Shirts That No One’s Worn Since 1989 - At the age of forty you’re officially allowed to wear those big tee-shirts from your wardrobe without feeling that you’re letting yourself down … preferably vibrant and neon enough to cure colour blindness and to be saying something Meaningful, ranging from ’Free Nelson Mandella’ to your company’s mission statement if you feel you really don’t care any more.
Body piercing - Just as reason separates us from the animals so horror at having parts of our body stapled with bits of metal and taking several hours to pass through airport security separates us from youth. If under any circumstances you still feel tempted, remind yourself to hang on in there as there’s always your first hip replacement to look forward to.
Book Group, Joining a - Bearing in mind that most men are still lip reading Dan Brown, having spent the previous decade doing the same for John Grisham, it’s not surprising that women of your age and older are the main attendees and will probably feel a need to discuss a book that doesn’t involve paranoic conspiracy theories or public schools for magicians.
Botox - Botox isn’t plastic surgery, of course, and colleagues will revert to their former selves within weeks or months, just in case you’re worried that you’re going to have David Gest sitting next to you for the next ten years.
Boyfriend - It’s a moot point whether you can still claim to have one at your advanced age. ‘Mum’s boyfriend’ does sound a tad Jacqueline Wilson as if you’ll always be accompanied by a long list of problems and a live-in social worker.
Brighton - The other sine qua non test for every forty person - aka do I think getting a used condom up the wheels of my buggy outside Brighton Arts Club is impossibly glamorous or just another nail in the coffin of western civilisation?
Five Favourite Forty Birthday Presents For Men:
Buena Vista Social Club CD
Historical novels about Roman centurion serial killers
Atlas for when the sat nav doesn’t work
Nose and ear hair clippers
Weekend wash bag …
Nine Fortysomething types …
The Pleased To Be Fortysomethings
The only people outside a developing world country with a life expectancy of thirty-seven, who positively welcome being in their fifth decade. They aren’t reading Mojo, wearing the same pair of jeans as their children or having plastic surgery and are boldly going where no one since Janet and John’s parents have gone before. They already own ten fleeces.
The Childless Fortysomethings
Their friends are jealous and sad in about equal amounts (varying with how much emergency childcare they’ve currently lumbered them with). Everyone worries if they’re having problems in the sex department or know what it will be like to have an old age without children to ring them up from Australia and ask if they’re alright?
The Embarrassing Fortysomethings
Aka Having a mid-life crisis in public. New demographic of mainly men over forty who haunt HMVs on Friday afternoons guiltily buying Cds and DVDs and upon whom the UK record industry is now almost single-handedly dependent.
The Expectant Fortysomethings
They now accept that up until now they have led narrow and selfish professional lives with expensive long-haul holidays but now realise they are at fault and that Fate’s comeuppance has helped them to see the error of their ways and prepare them for a future without a Philippe Starck white sofa and a lifetime of eating in Pizza Hut.
The Insecure Fortysomethings
In the workplace they face a perpetual dilemma: put their date of birth on their CV and the 22 year-old recruiter bin it but if they don’t their employer knows straightaway that they remember Steeleye Span.
The Older Child Still At Home Fortysomethings
They thought that with the end of parental responsibilities, they’d be going on expensive holidays and shopping in Waitrose. Instead they have to make love in the utility room because their unemployed twenty-three year-old is back from university playing Razorlight upstairs.
The Second Family Fortysomethings
They don’t know what’s hit them. Although over the head with a heavy mallett might be one way of describing it …
The Redundant Fortysomethings
If someone had told them in their thirties that they’d be sitting in an industrial estate outside Milton Keynes being asked to define their aims and objectives by a person who would once have been burnt at the stake, they wouldn’t have believed it.
The Middle England Fortysomethings
They believe that by their age everyone should be a fully signed-up member of the Middle England tribe - otherwise they will just have to send Simon Heffer around to give them a good seeing to.
Published 6th September 2007
From the bestselling author of last year’s
I Hate the Office comes a must-have guide to being in your forties in the noughties …
Malcolm Burgess – journalist, scriptwriter and full-time forty-something – presents a riotous A – Z of the realities of fortysomething life today. Riotous, that is, like having your iPod on in the house.
Today’s fortysomethings have never had it so good – or so confusing. While our parents could look forward to a sensible middle age we’re more likely to be playing our Morrissey records and thanking God Jonathan Ross is on Radio 2. There are so many different ways of being in our forties that many of us aren’t quite sure where we’re supposed to go next – or just how grumpy we’re meant to be.
Forty-fied is the hilariously wry and observant essential guide to this complex decade in our lives. The Metro newspaper columnist and bestselling author of I Hate The Office leaves no embarrassing fortysomething scenario unturned – or do we mean unstoned?
For anyone forty and fabulous, or who’s forty and owns ten fleeces, this is the laugh-loud funny book of your dreams … and no doubt your screams, too.
About the author:
Malcolm Burgess comic series have appeared in The Times, the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine, the Evening Standard and its ES magazine, the Financial Times, the Guardian, and the Metro, in which I Hate the Office, his recent bestselling book, was originally a weekly column, and his current Chalk and Cheese column is proving hugely popular. He worked in book publishing for many years and since ran the Essex Book Festival. He lives near Brentwood and is available for interview.
Forty-fied · The Good, the Bad and the Sad of Fortysomething Life · Malcolm Burgess · Icon Books · 6th September 2007 · B-format hardback · ISBN 978-1840468-23-6
First and second serial rights are available. For more information please contact: Andrew Furlow, Marketing Director, Icon Books andrew.furlow@iconbooks.co.uk / 01763 207158
Please turn over for Malcolm’s Forty-something miscellany …
Six facts about Forty-somethings:
One-third of MySpace users are aged between 35 and 49
47% of podcast consumers are over 35
Soon half of all albums will be bought by people over forty
Model agencies report a 40% increase in demand for over-forty models.
One-third of You Tube users are over 45
The average age of casual video gamers is 41 (and half are women)
Nine Fortysomething ailments:
Mistaken identity - Potentially serious condition by which you believe you are actually much younger than you are. Ages can range from early thirties to as young as six and can be brought on by a wide range of triggers from a quick lunchtime botox to someone telling you you’d like Second Café
Festival Ear - Condition chiefly brought about by not having attended a rock festival for over twenty years. Early signs include the comment ‘why is the music so loud, I don’t remember it being this ear-splitting when we were playing our nose flutes at Glastonbury in 1983. What’s wrong with today’s young people?’
Americana - Faux country and western music whose moaning songs about unsuccessful love, depression and bleak prairie landscapes seem to strike a chord with forty something men.
Anniston, Jennifer - Nearly forty, a fabulous TV career, some decent films and a multi-millionairess … Nearly forty, a series of failed relationships and no children. Only you know how jealous, bitter and twisted you’re feeling today.
Antiques Roadshow, The - The litmus test of advancing middle age. Best to sell it on e-Bay if you can and avoid being publically humiliated as the person who used a Spodewear sugar bowl to keep the rabbits’ rectal thermometer in for twelve years.
Baby Boomers - Whether it’s Bill Clinton doing his post-Presidential thing or Helen Mirren winning Oscars, we can’t help but hear what a fabulous time the ‘Sixties’ generation is having … You, in return, can look forward to working forever, having a pathetic pension, if any, paying for your children’s university education and realising you’ll be about ninety when your mortgage is finally paid.
Barbecues - It is expected that sooner or later the forties man will wish to purchase a barbecue. By succumbing to his ‘inner sausage pricker’ he is answering a call that lies deep in the male psyche to have a burning pyre in his own back garden and to wear a plastic bra and panties apron.
Being Confused - Can someone your age be arrested for going on MySpace? Which focus group from hell came up with Bratz Diamond Sasha? What’s the point of flash mobbing and dancing around a furniture store after work with people you’ve never seen before? Don’t worry, you’re just reaching the foothills or shallow waters of middle age.
Big Tee Shirts That No One’s Worn Since 1989 - At the age of forty you’re officially allowed to wear those big tee-shirts from your wardrobe without feeling that you’re letting yourself down … preferably vibrant and neon enough to cure colour blindness and to be saying something Meaningful, ranging from ’Free Nelson Mandella’ to your company’s mission statement if you feel you really don’t care any more.
Body piercing - Just as reason separates us from the animals so horror at having parts of our body stapled with bits of metal and taking several hours to pass through airport security separates us from youth. If under any circumstances you still feel tempted, remind yourself to hang on in there as there’s always your first hip replacement to look forward to.
Book Group, Joining a - Bearing in mind that most men are still lip reading Dan Brown, having spent the previous decade doing the same for John Grisham, it’s not surprising that women of your age and older are the main attendees and will probably feel a need to discuss a book that doesn’t involve paranoic conspiracy theories or public schools for magicians.
Botox - Botox isn’t plastic surgery, of course, and colleagues will revert to their former selves within weeks or months, just in case you’re worried that you’re going to have David Gest sitting next to you for the next ten years.
Boyfriend - It’s a moot point whether you can still claim to have one at your advanced age. ‘Mum’s boyfriend’ does sound a tad Jacqueline Wilson as if you’ll always be accompanied by a long list of problems and a live-in social worker.
Brighton - The other sine qua non test for every forty person - aka do I think getting a used condom up the wheels of my buggy outside Brighton Arts Club is impossibly glamorous or just another nail in the coffin of western civilisation?
Five Favourite Forty Birthday Presents For Men:
Buena Vista Social Club CD
Historical novels about Roman centurion serial killers
Atlas for when the sat nav doesn’t work
Nose and ear hair clippers
Weekend wash bag …
Nine Fortysomething types …
The Pleased To Be Fortysomethings
The only people outside a developing world country with a life expectancy of thirty-seven, who positively welcome being in their fifth decade. They aren’t reading Mojo, wearing the same pair of jeans as their children or having plastic surgery and are boldly going where no one since Janet and John’s parents have gone before. They already own ten fleeces.
The Childless Fortysomethings
Their friends are jealous and sad in about equal amounts (varying with how much emergency childcare they’ve currently lumbered them with). Everyone worries if they’re having problems in the sex department or know what it will be like to have an old age without children to ring them up from Australia and ask if they’re alright?
The Embarrassing Fortysomethings
Aka Having a mid-life crisis in public. New demographic of mainly men over forty who haunt HMVs on Friday afternoons guiltily buying Cds and DVDs and upon whom the UK record industry is now almost single-handedly dependent.
The Expectant Fortysomethings
They now accept that up until now they have led narrow and selfish professional lives with expensive long-haul holidays but now realise they are at fault and that Fate’s comeuppance has helped them to see the error of their ways and prepare them for a future without a Philippe Starck white sofa and a lifetime of eating in Pizza Hut.
The Insecure Fortysomethings
In the workplace they face a perpetual dilemma: put their date of birth on their CV and the 22 year-old recruiter bin it but if they don’t their employer knows straightaway that they remember Steeleye Span.
The Older Child Still At Home Fortysomethings
They thought that with the end of parental responsibilities, they’d be going on expensive holidays and shopping in Waitrose. Instead they have to make love in the utility room because their unemployed twenty-three year-old is back from university playing Razorlight upstairs.
The Second Family Fortysomethings
They don’t know what’s hit them. Although over the head with a heavy mallett might be one way of describing it …
The Redundant Fortysomethings
If someone had told them in their thirties that they’d be sitting in an industrial estate outside Milton Keynes being asked to define their aims and objectives by a person who would once have been burnt at the stake, they wouldn’t have believed it.
The Middle England Fortysomethings
They believe that by their age everyone should be a fully signed-up member of the Middle England tribe - otherwise they will just have to send Simon Heffer around to give them a good seeing to.
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