Books

Neuroscientist Dr. Sarah McKay traces the female brain across the whole span of a woman’s life — from girlhood and the menstrual cycle through pregnancy, menopause, and old age — showing how hormones, experience, and biology shape the mind at every stage. For readers over 50, the later chapters on menopause and healthy brain aging are especially resonant, set in the fuller context of a lifetime.

Dr. Lisa Mosconi makes the case that women’s brains age differently — and that women account for roughly two-thirds of Alzheimer’s cases, in large part because of the hormonal shifts of menopause. Grounded in neuroscience, this is a practical roadmap for protecting your memory and cognitive health, with a special focus on the role of estrogen.

Joan Didion’s masterpiece on grief after the sudden death of her husband of 40 years. A lucid, devastating, and ultimately illuminating account of what it means to lose a life partner and face the future alone. Essential for any woman navigating widowhood or profound loss.

After an impoverished Jamaican childhood, immigration at fourteen, and years of abuse, Donna Marie Hayes built a Wall Street career and an off-Broadway show — then lost her savings to the ‘love of her life.’ A memoir of being scammed, and of reclaiming her power.

This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism by the dynamic Ashton Applewhite is a call to action on many fronts, beginning in our minds. As Ashton writes, “This book is a call to wake up to the ageism in and around us, embrace a more nuanced and accurate view of growing older, cheer up, and push back.
What ideas about aging have each of us internalized without even realizing it? How do they play out across our lives, from office to bedroom, in muscle and memory?
What can we do, individually and collectively, to catalyze a radical age movement to make it happen?
Let’s find out.”

I first learned about anti-ageism activist Ashton Applewhite through her terrific TED talk. She also led the team that developed Old School, a clearinghouse of anti-ageism resources.

The fact that she is out there doing good work, reminding us to include ourselves in the circle of those deserving equality, makes me happy and reminds me once again how important it is for older women to write our sexy stories.

In this is who I am: our beauty in all shapes and sizes pictures of women up to age 95, unclothed, with a statement by each woman, form the basis of this photographic essay book.  It is a beautiful book that reminds us to love and cherish the great gifts that are our bodies:  So much of what these women wrote concerns their worries about the appearance of their bodies. 

The contrast between their beauty and their worries is poignant.

Over the three days around her daughter Debbie’s wedding, Gail Baines — recently passed over at work and never at ease with people — finds her carefully ordered life upended when her ex-husband arrives with a foster cat and a family secret surfaces. Anne Tyler’s slim late novel is a masterwork of compression: a woman in her sixties quietly reckoning with the marriage she left and the life still ahead of her.

A poet, ‘a stranger to death,’ learns her brother is dying and confronts hidden family truths; before she can absorb his loss, her aging mother’s health fails. A meditation on grief, caregiving, and mortality.

From chartered psychologist Dr. Denise Taylor, ThriveSpan is a reflective, research-grounded guide to later life — charting a more conscious path through aging where wellbeing, purpose, and reflection meet. Drawing on psychology, lived experience, and the restorative influence of nature, it reframes growing older as a season to walk gently into what matters now.

Four short stories slip into the gaps of the Menopausal Superheroes series, revealing what came before, after, and alongside the novels. Fuerte confesses his transition, the Lizard Woman hunts a vanished friend, and Flygirl faces a wedding and a daring rescue. Heroism, it turns out, comes at any age or stage of life.

Lottie Jones is seventy-five, retired, and — as far as her bingo friends know — perfectly ordinary. What they don’t know is that Lottie is a retired serial killer who long ago changed her name and vanished into small-town life. When a dogged young journalist turns up asking about a string of unsolved cases, Lottie’s quiet retirement is suddenly, dangerously over. A sharp, blackly funny thriller.

A candid, funny-but-brutal memoir-in-essays about the four years spent caring for a dying eighty-six-year-old father — refusing to romanticize caregiving or its toll on a family.

Sa’ and Ch’idzigyaak are two old women, abandoned by their Athabascan tribe during a desperate winter. Rather than die as expected, they decide to survive — and in doing so, teach their community something essential about the value of its elders. Velma Wallis’s retelling of a traditional Alaskan legend is brief, powerful, and quietly radical.

A registered dietitian’s warm, anti-diet guide to being at home in a changing body. Deb Benfield untangles the “anti-aging” and wellness messaging that puts older women at war with themselves, offering a way to nourish and trust your body — through food, movement, and mindfulness — rather than police it.

Unmasked: Women Write about Sex and Intimacy After Fifty

This book is part fiction, part essay, part poetry. The project was designed to help raise the level of visibility of the sexuality of women past fifty, and includes a wide variety of styles and approaches. The poems have some great lines to launch our thoughts into new creations.

I can’t do better than quote the authors “This collection of essays and poetry is meant to bring sex after fifty for women into the open, to proclaim that it is important, it is natural and healthy and, for some women, it is absolutely necessary. Unmasked will surprise, inform, and–it is hoped–encourage all women of a certain age to (re)discover their sexuality.”

Read this book to spark your thinking as well as your artistic side.

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.

In a letter to someone she loves above all others, Violeta recounts a life spanning a hundred years and two pandemics — from her birth in the 1920s, as the Spanish flu reaches her South American homeland, to old age. Through the Great Depression, the rise and fall of tyrants, and the fight for women’s rights, she lives devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy. Isabel Allende delivers an epic, deeply emotional portrait of a woman whose passion, determination, and humor carry her through a century of upheaval.

A widowed nurse-midwife rebuilds her life through a medical mission in South Sudan, delivering babies in mud-walled clinics amid civil unrest and finding purpose in grief.

Why it’s here: Its narrator is 45 rather than 50+, but this widow’s grief-and-rebirth story of reinvention and purpose resonates well beyond her exact age.

Divorced and middle-aged, Kim returns to Florida to help her aging mother and is pulled into a cascade of family crises, including relatives coping with dementia. A standalone later-in-life women’s fiction novel.

A woman accompanies her terminally ill friend through the final weeks of her life — and through the process confronts her own relationship to mortality, meaning, and what we owe each other at the end. Sigrid Nunez writes about dying with the same precise, unsentimental intelligence she brings to everything.

When her husband of forty-three years leaves alone for a dig in Peru, sixty-four-year-old Eisel Jane McCord finally chases her own teenage bucket list — a house of her own and a great romance — with two suitors complicating the plan. Book 2 of the Lovesong Encore later-in-life romance series.

Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön offers radical advice for facing life’s most painful moments — not by escaping them, but by moving toward them with openness. Profound comfort for women navigating divorce, loss, illness, or any form of transition.

Book one of the Women of the Canyon series. In a near-future desert community, five women aged 58 to 74 find each other at the moment life asks each of them to begin again — with Raven, a horse trainer and psychologist who can read fear in a skittish mare and a guarded heart, at the center. When old power tries to script the canyon’s future, the five choose to write their own. Pangman published this, her debut novel, at 73, and is blunt about the intent: older women are too often written as supporting characters in someone else’s story, and these five are not.

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.