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.

Unable to shake a midlife emptiness, Janet Wilson and her husband drive 25,000 miles across Africa; through tragedy and hardship they transform a decades-long marriage into deeper trust. A later-life story of reinvention.

Ninety years old and newly diagnosed with uterine cancer, Norma Bauerschmidt declined treatment and got in the motorhome with her son and daughter-in-law instead. A book about an old woman making her own call about her own ending.

At 60, Nan Watkins set out alone to circumnavigate the globe — moving east toward dawn across Asia, Australia, and beyond. Her travel memoir is a record of a woman in motion at an age when the culture suggests slowing down, written with the observational eye of someone who has learned to pay attention.

A newly divorced Midwestern school librarian travels solo through Ireland over six years, seeking healing from divorce and depression and finding self-acceptance in the second half of life.

In 1955 Emma Gatewood told her children she was going for a walk and became the first woman to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail alone, at sixty-seven, in Keds. Montgomery reconstructs both the walk and the marriage she was walking away from.

In 1988, at age 50, Helen Thayer became the first woman to travel on foot to the magnetic North Pole — 364 miles over 27 days, with only her husky Charlie for company and protection against the polar bears. Her account of that journey, and of the bond with the dog who kept her alive, is a bracing reminder of what midlife courage can look like.

From a sheltered Baptist girlhood to a semester in Colombia and travels across more than forty countries, Suzanne LaVenture learns to question her inherited beliefs. A warm, funny memoir of love, faith, and self-discovery.

Why it’s here: A woman in the second half of life looks back on a lifetime of wandering and the faith she questioned and remade along the way.

Gelman dismantled a settled life at forty-eight and kept moving for the next two decades, living with families rather than in hotels. A founding text for women who want the second half to be larger than the first, not smaller.

Thayer was sixty-three, and her husband seventy-four, when they walked sixteen hundred miles across the Gobi in summer. She is matter-of-fact about the physical arithmetic of doing this at that age, which is exactly what makes it useful.