A bunch of London seniors learn 'How to Age Disgracefully' when they join a rambunctious club

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 its 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 readying '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.

How to Age Disgracefully

By: Clare Pooley.

Publisher: Pamela Dorman Books, 320 pages, $29.