Writing through grief: Publicist becomes a novelist to fulfill her mother’s dying wish
“You’re Too Old For That” is a regular series that explores inspiring activities being pursued by those over 50 years old who feel you’re never too old to do what lights you up.
The Cabernet Club, a novel by Rona S. Zable and Margie Zable Fisher, begins with a quote from an unknown author: “It is never too late to be who you might have been.”
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This theme runs through the novel as main character Debbie Gordon forges a new life in Florida’s Palmetto Pointe retirement community, far from her New England home or her daughter and grandchildren in Delaware. The Cabernet Club, a group of three women in the community who become fast friends, adopt the motto of “Why can’t the rest of your life be the best of your life?”
Author Margie Zable Fisher lives this philosophy. Zable Fisher is only 58 years old, but she’s already had three different careers, launching two of them after she turned 50. A lively and active GenXer who enjoys pickleball, triathlons and is an advocate for what she calls “positive aging,” Zable Fisher proves you’re never too old for, well, really – anything.
From PR to finance writing to fiction
Zable Fisher initially earned her MBA in finance but never pursued that path. She ran a Public Relations agency for 20 years.
After leaving PR around the age of 50, she leveraged her finance degree to carve out a career in personal finance writing, quickly accruing bylines in publications like Fortune, AARP, and Next Avenue. “Everyone wants to write fun lifestyle stuff, but it’s much trickier to find writers to do finance and technical [writing],” she said.
Until a few years ago, she had no idea her next step would be writing in a completely different format: women’s fiction.
Zable Fisher published her first novel, a collaboration with her mother, the late Rona S. Zable, in January 2025. The Hollywood pitch for The Cabernet Club might be “Golden Girls meets Schitt’s Creek.” And yes, Zable Fisher said she envisions a streaming series coming out of what will, ultimately, be a trilogy.
“I just fell in love with the characters after book one, so I decided I want to write a three-book series,” she said.
Learning everything she could
You might say Zable Fisher was born with ink running through her veins. Her mother, Rona Zable, published three Young Adult novels with Bantam Doubleday Dell in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Then she worked as editor of SeniorScope, New England’s largest senior newspaper.
In her retirement, Rona Zable started working on The Cabernet Club, dabbling for years with storylines and characters. But she never finished it before dying of pancreatic cancer in 2023.
As the mother and daughter were talking days before Zable’s death, Zable Fisher said she wanted to get the book published. “I knew it needed some work, [but] it would be a gift to the world,” she said.
Her mother insisted that she go through the traditional publishing route, not self-publish it.
Following her mother’s death, Zable Fisher took a sabbatical from finance writing and dove deep into finishing the book and finding a publisher, a process that allowed her to work through her grief through sheer distraction.
“I was looking at an almost inch-high pile of paper, along with computer files. She liked to print out different chapters and move stuff around,” Zable Fisher recalled. “I went through all of it and knew it needed work, but I didn’t know what it needed. I was a reader of fiction, but I had never written fiction. So I hired a development editor.”
At the same time, Zable Fisher focused on learning everything she could about the craft of fiction writing through books, podcasts, and online courses. Without the mental or emotional bandwidth to do anything else as she grieved, she put her heart into the book.
“Basically, I distracted myself, put my head down for 10 hours a day and focused on this,” she said. “I ended up adding about 20,000 words, changed the plot a bit, changed the timeline, added a romance, and polished it up.”
‘My mother was my first editor’
As Zable Fisher intended, the book became a true collaboration that brought her even closer to her mother. “We were [always] very close,” Zable Fisher said. “She was a single parent. I’m an only child. She was my first editor.”
Throughout the process, Zable Fisher said, it sometimes felt as if her mom were speaking through her fingers on the keyboard as she developed certain scenes or wrote snippets of dialogue.
She would often pause to consider if her mom would approve of a specific scene and if it stayed true to her mother’s initial vision.
“My goal was for someone to read the novel and not know two people wrote it,” she said.
The result is a women’s fiction title that launched as an Amazon Top 10 Hot New Release in several categories, including single women’s fiction, women’s humorous fiction, and Jewish literature.
The legacy
Above all else, Zable Fisher wanted to complete this project to honor her mother. “That really kept me going,” she said. “What else was I going to do?”
But she found so much more than just a distraction from her grief or a fun hobby. “I have internal validation, but boy, did I get external validation from this endeavor,” she said.
As Zable Fisher aims to publish book 2 of The Cabernet Club in October 2026, she’ll be pushing the envelope a bit more and embracing her own voice as a novelist. “Book two is much spicier,” she said. “It will have a lot more of my spin on things, but still the same tone.”
Meanwhile, she continues to build her personal brand around positive aging concepts. “Pretty much everything I write about, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, has to do with positive aging, whether it’s financial, health, lifestyle, humor, or friendship. The Cabernet Club is all about friendship.”
And, as the women of Palmetto Pointe would agree, you’re truly never too old for that.
Are you doing something inspiring? Do you know someone who is pursuing a passion in their older years? If you or someone you know is 50 years old or older and should have their inspiring story told, please email the editors at Nifty 50+
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