Books

Recently widowed and facing the return of advanced breast cancer, Kat Jamison retreats to a Blue Ridge Mountains cabin to decide whether to keep fighting. When a wildfire traps her with two stranded children and their dogs, she must lead them on foot through a burning forest — and discover how fiercely she still wants to live. A taut survival novel anchored by an older woman’s reckoning with mortality.

This visually stunning book includes photographs and quotes from women in from their sixties all the way to a hundred years of age.  Some of these women are well-known and others are obscure.  All show the beauty of women as we grow in age and wisdom.  Try this book as a stimulus to your own creativity as a writer and artist.

Palliative care physician Kathryn Mannix has spent her career helping people die well. In this luminous book she shares the stories of patients and families navigating the end of life — and makes the case that dying, approached with honesty and preparation, can be peaceful rather than frightening. Essential reading for anyone who intends to grow old.

Suze Orman addresses the financial challenges unique to women — pay gaps, caregiving breaks, longer lifespans — with a concrete action plan for retirement, savings, and financial independence.

Mary Pipher, the psychologist who wrote Reviving Ophelia, turns her attention to older women in this luminous portrait of aging as a time of hard-won joy. Drawing on interviews and her own experience, she explores how women in their 60s, 70s, and beyond find meaning, resilience, and unexpected pleasure — even in the face of loss.

Half of romance readers are over fifty, yet few novels reflect their vivid lives. This roadmap shows you how to craft, edit, publish, and market a vibrant late-life love story. Your adventures as a late-life romance author begin here.

Lynette Reiling’s guide to the second half is built on William Bridges’ three-phase model of transition — the ending, the disorienting middle, the new beginning — and is meant to be read years before you think you need it. The middle gets the most attention and the most useful writing: the stretch Bridges called the Neutral Zone, where, as Reiling puts it, “I am no longer who I was, but do not yet know who I will become.” Eleven “script writing” tools follow, with questions and exercises for putting yourself back at the center of your own life. Practical rather than inspirational, and several readers describe working through it in groups.