Books

Elizabeth White was a high-achieving professional when financial catastrophe hit in her 50s. Her unflinching account of downward mobility, shame, and survival is essential reading for the millions of older women navigating economic insecurity — and a practical call for structural change.

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.

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.

Raymond Jetson examines the experience of aging through a Black American lens — the particular vulnerabilities, strengths, and communal resources that shape how Black elders grow old in a country that has never treated them equally. A frank and necessary perspective on race, age, and dignity.

Brené Brown’s landmark work on vulnerability — how the willingness to be seen, to take risks, and to embrace imperfection is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, and creativity. Transformative for women who have spent decades in shame-driven perfectionism.

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.

Over a ten-year search, the author comes to know the Cuban-exile father she barely knew, alongside an adopted Cherokee-Jewish soldier father and an Iranian stepfather — each a different version of love and absence. Confronting inherited wounds, she dismantles the myths she carried about her fathers and herself.

Why it’s here: A woman in her later life pieces together three fathers and her own inheritance — a mature reckoning with family and identity.

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.

The Atlas of Beauty is indeed an atlas, with women from all over the world shown in their environment, the garments they wear, and with representatives of all sizes, ages, and cultures.

The women engage us with their direct gazes, making themselves real to us across distance and culture.

A truly fascinating look at women across the globe.

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.

Benedictine sister Joan Chittister reflects on the gifts that can only come with age — perspective, depth, freedom from approval, the ability to love without condition. A quietly radical and deeply comforting meditation on growing older.

After her mother’s funeral, a widow returns to her mother’s Minnesota hometown and is drawn into an Ojibway family’s two-century dispossession from their land — confronting her own inherited history. A late-life memoir of loss and reckoning.

After an impoverished Jamaican childhood, immigration at fourteen, and years of abuse, Donna Marie Hayes built a Wall Street career and an off-Broadway show — then lost her savings to the ‘love of her life.’ A memoir of being scammed, and of reclaiming her power.

Myrlie Evers-Williams recounts her journey from marriage to civil-rights leader Medgar Evers and his assassination through single motherhood, education, public service, and leadership of the NAACP. Her memoir is a candid account of resilience, self-discovery, and becoming a powerful woman in her own right.