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.

Princesses Neve, Della, and Bry have lived their happily-ever-after in the kingdom of Foreverness for thirty years — until the king’s sudden death sends each on a quest that shatters the illusion of royal perfection. A fantasy of midlife rebellion and new legends.

Why it’s here: Its three heroines are women well past the fairy-tale ending, rebelling and remaking their lives in midlife — an older-women’s story in fairy-tale dress.

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.

A companion collection in the Menopausal Superheroes series, bundling two interlude novellas and a set of short stories. It goes behind and between the novels to deepen the world of Patricia the Lizard Woman, Fuerte, Flygirl, and Dr. Cindy Liu, exploring what it means to be a hero at any age or stage of life.

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.

Springfield refuses to stay saved. A new mutation sends the women’s powers into dangerous, unstable spikes, and only Flygirl is unaffected. Racing to find a cause and a cure, she must cooperate with the very scientist who changed their lives, while romances, weddings, and divorces test whether these heroines can truly have it all.

A prequel to Dakota Blues, exploring Karen Grace’s earlier life and the career and marriage pressures that precede her midlife road trip.

With great power comes great frustration. As the newly transformed women adjust to life as superheroes, Patricia presses on alone to find the woman who changed them, while Jessica and Linda train with a covert agency known as The Department. Old threats resurface, and controlling their new abilities proves harder than any of them expected.

Willa Drake is 61 when a phone call upends her settled life and sends her across the country to help a near-stranger. Anne Tyler’s novel is a gentle meditation on reinvention, on the ways we close ourselves off, and on what it takes to start over in the second half of life.

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.

Karen Grace is far from home and newly unemployed when she agrees to take an elderly neighbor on one last road trip in a vintage RV. Along the way she confronts the truth about her marriage and begins reinventing her life at fifty. First book in the later-in-life Dakota Blues series.

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.

The Menopausal Superheroes step out of the shadows, and the pressure mounts on every front. As public scrutiny intensifies and their personal lives strain under the weight of secret identities, the women must navigate fresh dangers while holding together a fragile alliance and the relationships that matter most.

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.

A short-story collection in the Menopausal Superheroes series, gathering four original tales that fill the gaps between the novels. The stories trace the fraught relationship between Patricia, the Lizard Woman, and her former friend turned mad scientist Dr. Cindy Liu, exploring what it means to be a hero in midlife and beyond.

When four ordinary women hit menopause, the change turns out to be far stranger than hot flashes. After using the same small company’s natural products, Helen can shoot fire, Patricia becomes bulletproof, Jessica floats, and Linda gains immense strength and a new male body. United by that one common link, the unlikely heroines set out to find the woman responsible.

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.

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.