Books

Jane Juska was a fearless explorer who set off to live an erotic adventure in her sixties and then write about it. She was a Berkeley, CA woman who placed an ad in the New York Review of Books personal section, saying she wanted to make love again before she died, and letting prospective partners know which literary figures she was prepared to discuss as foreplay.

She traveled to New York multiple times, meeting prospective lovers and capturing the stories in her book. Juska was a witty and unsinkable woman who would have been a great neighbor or dinner companion – although she seemed to be without fellow women travelers in her adventures. She broke through society’s image of what an older woman could be at a time when few women lived that life and almost no one wrote about it. A brave and valuable tale.

Naturally it’s not just women who enjoy making love with men over fifty; I’m sure there are men buying this book too!

But for a woman who makes love with a man of a certain age, this book provides useful insights to the ways men’s sexuality changes over time. The main theme of the book is that men’s sexual responses slow with the years. Men take longer to arouse after fifty, and in fact become more like us women in that regard. It is our turn to be patient and encouraging. But there are many more specifics here as well, and the book is worth reading for the helpful hints it provides.

Through anecdote, playful exercises, interviews and writing samples, Aphrodite’s Pen encourages ripe women to explore erotic writing as a joyful practice — the first book of its kind, for older women embarking on an intimate journey of personal growth.

Joan Price writes candidly about sexuality after sixty — desire, dating, body changes, and intimacy. Warm, funny, and deeply affirming for any woman wondering if her erotic life is over. It is not.

Sex educator Emily Nagoski uses the science of desire to help women understand their sexuality — why it works, why it doesn’t, and how context shapes arousal. Indispensable for women navigating low libido and changing desire during menopause.

In this Taschen book (if you don’t know Benedikt Tashen’s outstanding publishing house, you should) Liz Earls talks of divorce, turning fifty and how these events changed her view of the world. If you are a woman who enjoys younger men, either to look at or to embrace, this book may be a great motivator for your writing.  Liz Earls shares sexy explicit photographs of her adventures with younger men in this uninhibited (and VERY Not Safe For Work)  collection.  Her verve is unmistakable.

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.

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.

When we write about sex, we often focus on the emotion it evokes – which is important and entirely understandable. Writing about sex itself, as a physical and sensory experience, it is easy to stumble into mechanistic descriptions. But in Free Fall, Rae Padilla writes sex scenes of unparalleled power and immediacy. Her language is gorgeous and her skill with a sentence will stop you cold. She immerses us in the visceral experience of this late life love affair, and then explores the countervailing pull of the narrator’s responsibilities to career and to an immensely demanding family life. If you have been ambushed by lust in your ripe years, if your desire has gone off like fireworks in the lives of the people around you, this story is sure to resonate. Free Fall is a book to relish first of all, and then to study for its lessons about the creative process. This book is a master course in writing about ripe love.

At forty-eight, after her husband comes out, a Manhattan psychologist sets out to reclaim her sexuality and shed decades of shame. A candid midlife awakening.

Why it’s here: Alisa is 48 — just under our line — but this is a midlife reclamation of self after a long marriage ends, squarely a woman’s second-act terrain.

Sex educator Tracey Cox writes frankly and practically about sex in the second half of life — what changes physiologically, what doesn’t have to change, and how to build a satisfying sex life well past 50. An honest, cheerful, and genuinely useful guide for women who refuse to believe the best is behind them.

In this book, Joan Price continues to explore late life sexuality. Joan’s grief over the death of her husband, and her creative ways to address her sexuality after that loss, are significant in this volume.

Joan also addresses how we continue to be sexual when our health issues, or the health of our partners, become challenges in our sexual expression.

William Blake wrote that “joy and pain are woven fine,” and in Naked at Our Age, Joan Price helps us ensure that the joy remains woven into the pattern of our lives.

After discovering her husband’s affair, Dorothy Freed packed up her sons, drove from upstate New York to California, and gave herself over to a new life. Perfect Strangers is her wry, candid memoir of sexual awakening in the free-love San Francisco of the mid-1970s — a woman past the expected age claiming her own desire and independence. Freed set the manuscript aside for decades before publishing it in her later years.

When Joan Price lost her husband, she found there was no roadmap for rediscovering intimacy after such a loss — so she wrote one. Drawing on her own widowhood and the candid stories of other widows and widowers, this warm, practical guide treats sexuality as a healthy, life-affirming part of moving through grief, on your own timeline and in your own way.

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.

At 72, after a divorce, profound loss and decades without intimacy, Andrea Feinberg made an online dating profile. What follows is the account of what happened next — the men of every age who pursued her, the encounters that were funny, the ones that were flatly disappointing, and the confidence that turned up unannounced somewhere in the middle. She spent a career as a marketing MBA and started writing erotica in her seventies, and the same plainness runs through this: no euphemism, no apology for wanting what she wants. Less a book about sex than about what becomes available to a woman who stops accepting that the door has closed.

Diana Athill wrote this memoir of old age at about 89: on sex and its fading, on letting go of what cannot be kept, and on the approach of death, without consolation or self-pity. Winner of the 2008 Costa Biography Award.

You remember Erica Jong: She who broke new ground with Fear of Flying, a 1973 novel that startled men and women at the time with its directness about female sexuality. Jong revisited sexuality in her 2015 novel Fear of Dying, which explores the sexual desire of a woman in her sixties. But before that novel, Jong edited this anthology of stories and essays by women of many ages about their sexual lives.

One of the loveliest things about this collection is the seamlessness of sexual experience across the stages of life; there is no pretense of reserving sexuality for the young. Read this book for the diverse ways women explore and describe and grow from erotic experience, throughout the lifespan. Every kind of experience, from purely physical release to sex as communion with spirit, is celebrated here.

The writer biographies at the back of the book hint at the kind of community we can build among ripe women awake to our eroticism.

Dr. Ogden was a professional who wrote with wisdom and compassion about how women reclaim their sexuality after midlife, in spite of social pressures, and in many cases in spite of a history of abuse. She has spent a lifetime developing her understanding of how we construct meaning about our sexuality and how we develop our sexual relationships. Readers of this book gain the benefit of her insights. Our relationships with ourselves are her ultimate concern.

Intimacy coach Nathalie Dewalhens names a new archetype — the Sensual Crone — for the woman whose desire didn’t vanish at menopause but grew weirder, wilder, and more interesting. Finished on her sixtieth birthday, this frank, unsugarcoated set of five truths runs from vaginal atrophy to neo-tantra to a hotel room in Bruges, insisting that erotic life after reproduction is a beginning, not an epilogue.

Allende at seventy-eight on feminism, impatient love, rage, and what a long life teaches a woman about her own appetite. Short, unhedged, and addressed directly to women rather than about them.

Joan Price is the foremost advocate for older people’s sexuality, and this is her definitive guide — covering everything from the physiological changes of menopause to navigating desire after illness, disability, or divorce. Frank, warm, and non-judgmental, it treats older women’s sexual lives with the seriousness they deserve.

Widowed at fifty-four and raising her neurodivergent son alone, Amy chronicles grief alongside an unexpected sensual reawakening — challenging the taboos around midlife female desire.