Books

A practical guide to navigating midlife and beyond through creativity and reinvention, from an author who has lived it into her seventies.

Why it’s here: Not a personal narrative but a resource for creative reinvention in the second half of life — the stage CroneHub is built for.

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.

Joan Price bills herself as the “senior sexpert,” a phrase that captures her late life career as an advocate for senior sexuality and the author of several non-fiction books on the subject. In Ageless Erotica, Price has collected well-written short stories about eroticism in later life, by both men and women. These stories cover a wide range of sexual orientation, gender identification, and realism alongside magic. All of the stories share a joy in the bodies we have now: Exploring them, rediscovering them, longing to share them.

This is one of the few books I am including that also has work by men. When you read it, pay attention to how the stories differ by gender – and how much they have in common. The notes about authors at the end of the book provide many ways to explore and connect with people who celebrate sexuality throughout our lives.

All We Know of Pleasure: Poetic Erotica by Women is a hugely satisfying collection edited by Enid Shomer and published by Carolina Wren Press.

It’s intriguing in part because the book is divided by the age of the poets and their subjects.
Part I, The Discovery of Sex, is all about first longing.
Part II, The Ordinary Day Begins, is about sex in the years of active motherhood.
Part III, When this Old Body, is of course my favorite and the part I read first.

“And suddenly, again, I want the long road of your thigh,” writes Jane Hirshfield of the desire that comes in long knowing.

“our bodies move and join / unbearably. / your face above me / is the face of all the gods / and beautiful demons,” writes Lenore Kandel, reminding us of the timelessness of lust.

“Neither of them was young. His beard was gray… But they kissed lavish kisses like the ocean in the early morning… We couldn’t look away,” writes Ellen Bass about a couple reunited at the Portland airport. These fine poems capture what it is to be a woman in love with life across its full span.

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.

The most buoyant of Sarton journals. She is seventy, with a full calendar of readings, a garden, new friendships, and the genuine surprise of finding this the best decade yet. Read alongside the later volumes it marks the high point, before illness enters the record.

When Janice Mason Steeves surveyed 138 artists aged 59 to 79 about their journeys into art, a pattern emerged: later life, far from being a barrier to creativity, can be an ideal time to begin. Weaving their stories with her own path from psychology to an international painting career, Steeves offers practical guidance and encouragement for anyone drawn to a creative life after 50.

Former 1980s rock hopeful Libby Conlin has long since buried her music — until her newly divorced daughter posts the old recordings online and the industry comes calling. As her past resurfaces, mother and daughter remake their lives in a story about second acts and redefining love.

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.

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.

This is an anthology of works performed at the (now sadly defunct) Octopus Literary Salon in Oakland, California, at readings of erotica by women over fifty. The Dirty Old Women reading series pushes San Francisco Bay Area culture in the direction of celebrating sexuality after menopause. This volume is a varied collection from the readings, with stories, book excerpts, and poetry.

Full disclosure: My short story, “Terraforming,” is included in this collection. Many of the other stories were written by friends, so naturally I am fond of this volume for personal reasons as well as the fun read it undoubtedly is. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, or if you travel there, check out the Dirty Old Women reading schedule (usually the 4th Tuesday of the month).

Eighty, and still keeping the account: birds, letters, visitors, the garden, and a clear-eyed reckoning with how much time is left. The title is not ironic. Sarton found this year had a great deal more in it than she had expected.

When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Photographer Jo Blackwell put that question to hundreds of women and photographed 166 of them exactly as they are — no make-up, no styling, no filters — each portrait paired with the woman’s own words about growing older, being seen, and letting go of unrealistic expectations. Featured by the BBC, it is not a glossy “embrace ageing” book; it is a quiet, truthful record of older faces, and an argument that every one of them is worth looking at.

Why it’s here: The portraits begin at forty, not fifty — but the project’s whole subject is the visibility and self-acceptance the second half of life demands, and its honest older faces are the point.

Two women in their 70s have been best friends since childhood, summering on a wild Maine peninsula they have vowed to protect from development. Alice Elliott Dark’s sweeping novel is about female friendship, legacy, secrets, and the question of what we owe the places and people we love most.

A fictionalized life of Japanese poet Yosano Akiko, who defied her era’s constraints to become a pioneering feminist and the first to render The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese. Through poverty, betrayal, earthquake, and fire, her fierce devotion to art wounds her daughter — and she sets out to make amends before it’s too late.

Why it’s here: It follows Akiko across a whole life into older age — an unflinching portrait of a woman artist aging and trying to repair what her ambition cost.

Muriel A. Murch recounts leaving Los Angeles with her film-editor husband for a farm in West Marin, where family life intertwines with organic farming and the Bay Area’s independent film world. A poetic tribute to land, work, and community.

An illustrated reflection for grown women on what it feels like to be “new at being old,” pairing wit and whimsy with sociologist-artist Lucy Rose Fischer’s vibrant original paintings. Moving from anxiety about the body’s “movable parts” to a celebration of vitality, creativity, and the richness of years, she finds herself joining a sisterhood of older women.

Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, adapted her famous creativity tools for people in retirement or any major life transition. Weekly tasks, morning pages, and artist’s dates — all recalibrated for the particular challenge of reinventing yourself when the structure of a career falls away.

Sarton was sixty-one when she kept this record of a single year in her New Hampshire farmhouse, writing deliberately against the sunny public image her earlier memoir had created. It is a book about solitude as a working condition rather than a sorrow, and it is unguarded about depression, rage, and the cost of arranging a whole life around the work.

A debut poetry collection of 30 poems written over 30 days, charting the raw terrain of midlife transformation — grief, shifting family roles, career change, and personal reinvention. Written by Jacqueline (Jack) Pérez, who discovered poetry at 60 and founded the pro-aging platform Kuel Life, it speaks directly to women over 50 ready to embrace what comes next.

Hilary Stevens, a poet in her seventies, submits to a day of interviews and ends up reviewing an entire life: the marriage, the women she loved, and where the poems came from. This is the novel in which Sarton wrote openly about lesbian love, at genuine professional cost to herself.

I have been a fan of Sharon Olds‘ poetry ever since she spoke out about incest in her collection, The Dead and the Living (1983). Her work is incredibly incisive, beautifully crafted, and utterly unblinking, even as she examines subjects we are discouraged from mentioning, much less capturing in poetry.

The personal nature of Olds‘ poetry, her focus on her children, her marriage, and her own sexuality, has made her controversial throughout her career. Yet she has persevered, and later in her career won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer for Stag’s Leap, her 2012 volume about the end of her long marriage.

In her 2016 book “Odes,” the poet explores sexuality from her vantage point as a woman in her sixties. Poems like “Blow Job Ode,” and “Ode to the Clitoris,” continue her saga of making the personal poetic.

These poems make it clear that being a certain age is no reason to stop examining (and enjoying) sexuality.

Southern women artists and writers — painters, sculptors, novelists, poets — reflect on creativity, aging, and what it means to keep making things as the years accumulate. Edited by Jay Lamar and Jennifer Horne, this anthology is a testament to the creative life as a lifelong practice, not something that fades at a certain age.

Piercy at eighty-four, writing poems about cats, cooking, marriage, the dead, and her own approaching end with no softening whatsoever. The late work of a poet who has been documenting women lives since the 1960s.