Robin Benoit Tells a Story of 'The 80-year Old Sorority Girls'

Author and sorority alumnae, Robin Benoit, visits us to talk about her debut novel, The Eighty-Year-Old Sorority Girls. The book tells the story of a group of 80-something friends who are dealing with the decline of their friend’s mental health. “The hardest aspect of this for me was the main character, Vivian. Vivian is the one that has Alzheimer’s and I really needed the reader to understand that Vivian was disappearing from her friends’ lives, and disappearing from the world as Alzheimer’s took her mind. I wanted her to slowly disappear through the story, just like she’s disappearing in real life and for the reader to feel like, ‘Where is Vivian? Where did Vivian go?’ I wanted them to feel that, as much as the characters, her friends, did.” Throughout her story, Benoit uses flashbacks to show her characters’ friendships evolving over the span of many years. “It seemed important to me to show their relationship. They’ve been friends for over 60 years. They’ve known each other since they were 18. They’ve gone through a lot of life together, and I really wanted to go back and show where that relationship started and some of the things that they had gone through and I loved the flashback and I’m glad that I went that way with it, but I wasn’t sure at first how that was going to work out.” As the story progresses, Vivian’s mind gradually declines and her memories begin to fade, as do the flashbacks.

For Benoit, her own mother suffered from Alzheimer’s and passed away at the age of 85. Watching the disease steal her mother’s mind was very difficult for her and she decided she would honor her mother by being an advocate for Alzheimer’s research and sharing with others what her mother went through. Benoit recalls the day she came up with the idea for The Eighty-Year-Old Sorority Girls. “One particular day my mother was very confused…when I got home that night from being with her, I told my husband about it and I said to him, just in passing, ‘If I ever have Alzheimer’s, my mind is probably back in college and my sorority house,’ and that was where the light bulb went off and I thought, ‘I can do this! I could put a positive sorority story out into the world and fight those negative stereotypes of what sorority girls are and I can honor my mother and try to be an advocate for Alzheimer’s research.'”