Books

After divorce upended the life she thought she’d have, Teri M. Brown climbed onto the back of a tandem bicycle and set out with her husband Bruce to pedal across the United States — from Astoria, Oregon to Washington, DC — at a steady 10.4 miles per hour. Part memoir, part motivational guide, the book unfolds as ten hard-won “rules” drawn from winding roads, unexpected detours, and the strangers who became part of the story. Each chapter pairs a personal anecdote with reflective prompts, inviting readers to map their own second-act adventures. An award-winning inspirational memoir about resilience, reinvention, and discovering what you’re capable of when you stop coasting.

At fifty, Maria Leonard Olsen had drunk her way out of a twenty-five-year marriage, put every egg in the motherhood basket, and willfully derailed a successful law career. Adrift, she gave herself a birthday assignment: fifty things she had never done before.

The first half of the book is why she needed the list. The second half works through it — adventure, travel, spirituality, physical challenge — with self-reflection questions after each. Olsen is a Washington DC lawyer, journalist and recovery advocate, and she is unsparing about the wreckage that came first.

Essays on being a mature woman still looking for a life of purpose while popular culture treats her as finished. Weldon is funny about invisibility without letting anyone off the hook for it. Winner of the Gilda Prize.

In this groundbreaking anthology, Black women writers, artists, and activists reflect on midlife with honesty, humor, and complexity. Edited by Carleen Brice, the collection centers voices that are too rarely heard in mainstream conversations about aging — bringing race, joy, grief, and reinvention together on the same page.

We’re often told to fear ageing — to shrink, quieten down, disappear a little. Jo Blackwell’s answer, written the year she approached 65, is that midlife is where the truth about ageing begins. Drawing on research and the lived experience of women in their fifties, sixties and seventies, she walks through confidence, menopause, ageist assumptions absorbed over a lifetime, and roles that no longer fit — without any pressure to reinvent yourself or “fix” what isn’t broken.

Warm, evidence-informed, and firmly on your side.

Brené Brown maps 87 emotions and experiences — naming them precisely and explaining how language shapes connection, belonging, and wellbeing. An invaluable tool for women in midlife working to understand and articulate their complex emotional lives.

Raffelock argues for a third archetype beyond maiden and mother: the woman whose creative and public life begins in earnest after fifty. Against the framing of midlife women as used up, defeminized or invisible.

Research professor Brené Brown’s guide to courageous leadership — vulnerability, trust, difficult conversations, and clarity of values. Powerful for women at any stage of their careers or community involvement, including those taking on leadership roles in midlife.

Jong at fifty, taking stock of the sexual revolution she helped write and of what it actually delivered to the women who lived it. The companion volume to Fear of Dying, and the more surprising of the two.

Millar is seventy-four and has had five careers, including civil engineering, teaching physics, building and losing businesses, and running a global headhunting firm through the 2008 crash. Her argument is that midlife advice keeps women waiting for systems to change, and that self-knowledge and boundaries are the faster route to autonomy.

At fifty-eight, just out of her longest relationship, Carolyn Lee Arnold decided not to look for a partner but to gather data — fifty first dates, tracked and reflected on, to work out what she actually wanted rather than what she had settled for twice before.

What follows is candid about desire, about dating as an older woman in the San Francisco Bay Area, and about the unexpected discovery that the project itself was the point.

Slater was a professor who became, accidentally, a fashion-world figure in her sixties. The memoir is about refusing invisibility without turning it into a brand, and about what she learned when the brand arrived anyway.

Fifty-two true accounts from people who had decided their romantic chapter was closed — widowed, divorced, discouraged, or simply tired of looking. Relationship coach Nancy Ripp White collects the meetings that happened anyway: a laundry room, a high-school flame resurfacing, a message arriving on an ordinary Tuesday. What runs through all of them is what she argues younger love rarely teaches — depth, clarity, gratitude, and a sharp sense of what time is worth.

The complications are here too, not smoothed over: adult children with opinions, blended families, grief that has not finished, independence nobody wants to hand back. Almost every story opens the same way — “I wasn’t looking” — and White’s point is that they were living, and love met them there.

As her 50th birthday approached, Jo Blackwell felt old, unfit, irrelevant and quietly terrified — so she started writing. The blog that became this book struck a chord with thousands of women asking the same question: what the heck just happened to my life? Collected here, the posts are wry, raw and reassuring by turns — ageing bodies, hormones, confidence, grief — landing on the simple conclusion that life is about family, friends, community and being useful, and that she was OK just as she was.

The honest, funny end of the midlife shelf.

The foundational text on grief and the stages that have helped millions of people understand their own mourning. Essential for women navigating loss of parents, spouses, health, identity, and roles that often cluster in midlife.

Interviews and portraits of women at fifty, on work, bodies, marriages and what they intend to do with the second half. The first in the series that continues with On Women Turning 70.

Jennifer L. Butz launched WonderCrone after colliding head-on with ageism at sixty, and Rebel Aging is her witty, clear-eyed reckoning with the myths women are handed about life after fifty. Part manifesto, part mirror, part marching orders, it reframes aging not as a descent but as a return — to voice, to vision, to self. Through personal stories, cultural critique, and a few well-placed shenanigans, Butz exposes how ageism shows up in our bodies, work, and relationships, and makes the case that wonder, wisdom, and purpose beat the lie of “anti-aging” every time. A rallying cry for reclaiming your edges, your joy, and your seat at any table.

Growing older isn’t the problem. Outdated thinking about aging is.

ReSet is a practical guide for anyone in midlife and beyond who knows there must be more to this stage of life than slowing down and fading out. We are living longer, healthier, more capable lives than any generation before us, yet our beliefs about aging haven’t kept pace. From subtle workplace bias to the quiet voice telling us “I’m too old for that,” ageism shapes how we see ourselves and limits what we believe is possible.

ReSet challenges those assumptions and offers a new way forward — inviting readers to rethink aging, reconnect with their strengths, and design a life of purpose, curiosity, and contribution on their own terms.

Yes, this is the same Gail Sheehy whose book Passages was such a hit. Here, Sheehy focuses in on women’s sexuality after midlife, using the same combination of narrative and interviews that she employed in her earlier blockbuster book. Sex and the Seasoned Woman  ranges across the United States, providing a State of the Union for what older women are thinking and doing about their sexuality. From rural sex toy parties to Southern cougars to New England women recommitting to long term relationships, it is all here. This book reminds us to remember the so-called “flyover” states – there are plenty of women past midlife nowhere near an ocean who celebrate their sexuality, each in her own way.

Gelman dismantled a settled life at forty-eight and kept moving for the next two decades, living with families rather than in hotels. A founding text for women who want the second half to be larger than the first, not smaller.

The classic 12-week program for recovering your creative self. Particularly powerful for women in midlife who have spent decades putting others first and are ready to reclaim — or discover for the first time — their creative lives.

Sonya Renee Taylor’s powerful call for radical self-love challenges us to examine how body shame and sizeism shape our lives — and offers a framework for rejecting these systems. Particularly valuable for women navigating body changes in midlife.

A faith-based guide for adult children — most often daughters — caring for aging parents. Drawing on her own experience, Jane Daly offers practical help with the hard decisions and the harder moments, woven together with Christian encouragement about grace, forgiveness, and finding peace through the caregiving season.

In this landmark work, Betty Friedan — author of The Feminine Mystique — turns her attention to what she calls the “age mystique”: the cultural insistence that growing older is only decline. Drawing on years of research and hundreds of interviews, she argues that the later decades can be a period of continued growth, purpose, and new freedom rather than a slow fade. Friedan dismantles stereotypes about work, sexuality, and care in old age, insisting that vitality after sixty is not the exception but the possibility. A foundational text for anyone rethinking what age can mean.