Books

At fifty, a cycling accident left Crosby, a professor and a lesbian, quadriplegic. She writes about pain, dependence, desire and gender in a body that no longer does what it did, without redemption arc.

Ma-Nee Chacaby was born into poverty on a remote Ojibwa-Cree reserve in Ontario, survived abuse and addiction, and came out as a lesbian elder at a time when her community had no name for what she was. Her autobiography is a story of survival, identity, and the power of Two-Spirit tradition — told with unflinching honesty by an elder who refused to disappear.

After decades of depression, addiction, and self-loathing, Maeve DuVally got sober and, as a public-facing communications executive at Goldman Sachs, took the hardest step of coming out as her true self. To her surprise the firm embraced her, and a New York Times profile launched a new life as a role model.

Why it’s here: Maeve steps fully into herself in her late fifties — a later-life memoir of reinvention and courage from a woman who refused to run out the clock as someone she wasn’t.

Miss Major, a Black trans woman in her late seventies, in conversation about Stonewall, prison organizing, six decades of movement work, and the particular authority of having outlived nearly everyone who said she would not.

Chicana playwright and activist Cherríe Moraga braids her own coming-of-age and coming out with the story of her mother, Elvira, and Elvira’s long decline into Alzheimer’s. It is a memoir about memory, inheritance, and the grief of watching a parent fade — and, through one family, a larger reckoning with Mexican American identity and belonging.

Margaret Fleming published her first book at eighty-eight, and she is still practicing as a psychotherapist. Rise covers a childhood destroyed by her father, a marriage spent trying to be normal, alcoholism and a near-fatal suicide attempt, and then the long rebuilding: sobriety, a degree in social work, a psychotherapy practice, an adoption agency for hard-to-place children, and coming out as a woman who loves women. She adopted the youngest of her ten children, a six-day-old infant, as a single mother in her late sixties.

Content note: this book describes incest and a suicide attempt.

Why it is here: Much of what Fleming survives happens long before fifty. It earns its place because it was written at eighty-eight, looking back across the whole of it, by a woman who kept recognizing second chances and taking them well into her sixties and beyond.

Poet Janet Mason reflects on the factory-working lives of her mother and grandmother in working-class Philadelphia while she cares for her mother through her final illness, and on the choices open to her as a lesbian daughter that were never open to her mother.

In her fifties, after decades in a long marriage, Suzette Mullen admitted to herself that she was gay. Her memoir follows the coming out, the end of the marriage and the slow work of building a life that fits. Published in the University of Wisconsin Press Living Out series.