Books

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Southern women in a locked-down senior community reinvent their love lives in thirteen tales of friendly vampires, sexy demons, and dream lovers — plus eight bonus stories of vibrant women from New York to California.

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.

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.

Shunned as a medieval healer and rescued by a vampire, Marion Chase joins a sisterhood devoted to ethical living. Five centuries later she runs a Chicago blood bank with a hidden sideline — until she falls for the one person who could destroy her.

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.