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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A spicy, satirical romp about a sixty-something woman who stumbles into a digital trap and comes out the other side owning her desire and her power. Billie Best skewers the culture’s assumptions about older women and sex, insisting with wit and nerve that a woman’s sensual life is far from over at 60.

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.

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).

n this poignant tale, Jong interweaves the narrator’s sexual experience in her sixties with tales of her formerly glamorous parents as their health fails. As my own mother told me when she was in her nineties and I was in my sixties, “Enjoy your youth.”

Jong’s protagonist is determined to do just that. She works hard to reclaim the joys of her long-term marriage, and dances to the siren music of potential affairs. Ripe women have been dancing that tightrope for centuries without the benefit of literary models; Jong’s art makes visible what has been invisible. For those of us determined to prioritize our own erotic and creative lives, even while doing our best for aging parents and young adult children, this book holds up a mirror to the lives we are leading.

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.

Our spiritual foremothers are the proper ladies of this California writing circle of the 1980s. The formal tone of these stories contrast beautifully with the tales of one-night stands, lovers who find each other after decades apart, and the bliss of married love as well. Just as in the Elderotica writing group that is still going strong in the Bay Area, the Ladies in this book use writing prompts to get their juices flowing, and they share some of their prompts here. As in my new book from North Atlantic Press, the Ladies’ Own Erotica encourages women of a certain age to come together in writing circles and share erotica and conversation.

Each of the women has a chance to tell her own story, and why she enjoyed the writing circle, in the “Kensington Ladies Revealed” chapter at the end of the book. There is something wonderful about coming together to write erotica, as these ladies discovered long ago.

Sarah Durham, a widowed theatre producer in her sixties, falls unexpectedly and humiliatingly in love, and has to reckon with desire in a body the world has stopped looking at. Lessing wrote it at seventy-seven and refuses every consolation the plot invites.

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.

Heyman is a New York psychiatrist who published this collection of her stories when she was 74. Not surprisingly given her profession, Heyman is a student of the human spirit, and her stories are most notable for the depth of the characters she develops. Her people are sexual even in the face of illness and with the specter of death in the wings. If you have ever had the good fortune to live in New York City, these characters will come to you like people you almost met. This story collection was well received (for example, Terry Gross interviewed the writer on NPR), and has helped to bring erotic writing by older women into public consciousness.

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.

The third collection from the Kensington Ladies’ Erotica Society — a group of women who have met in Berkeley for over twenty-five years to share the fantasies polite company won’t. Older now, and if anything bolder, they treat death as a mere distraction next to the twin appetites of mind and body. By turns racy and reflective, outrageous and open-hearted, these stories insist that desire doesn’t retire.