Books

We’re often told to fear ageing — to shrink, quieten down, disappear a little. Jo Blackwell’s answer, written the year she approached 65, is that midlife is where the truth about ageing begins. Drawing on research and the lived experience of women in their fifties, sixties and seventies, she walks through confidence, menopause, ageist assumptions absorbed over a lifetime, and roles that no longer fit — without any pressure to reinvent yourself or “fix” what isn’t broken.

Warm, evidence-informed, and firmly on your side.

Gerontologist Tracey Gendron, who chairs the Department of Gerontology at Virginia Commonwealth University, argues that ageism is the most normalized of all prejudices — one that shapes how we treat others and how we see our own aging. Grounded in research but written for a general reader, the book is a clear-eyed guide to recognizing age bias and beginning to unlearn it.

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.

A companion collection in the Menopausal Superheroes series, bundling two interlude novellas and a set of short stories. It goes behind and between the novels to deepen the world of Patricia the Lizard Woman, Fuerte, Flygirl, and Dr. Cindy Liu, exploring what it means to be a hero at any age or stage of life.

Margaret Morganroth Gullette argues that aging is not a biological fate but a cultural construction — that we are “aged by culture” long before our bodies slow down. This rigorous, impassioned book gives women the intellectual tools to identify and resist the ageism that shapes how we see ourselves and each other.

Social gerontologist Jeanette Leardi makes the case that later life is a time of growth, purpose, and possibility, not inevitable decline. Drawing on research, vivid comparisons, and personal stories, she exposes the forces that frame aging as loss and offers practical strategies for aging with dignity and agency.

Raymond Jetson examines the experience of aging through a Black American lens — the particular vulnerabilities, strengths, and communal resources that shape how Black elders grow old in a country that has never treated them equally. A frank and necessary perspective on race, age, and dignity.

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.

Divorced at sixty-three, Jessie Woodley inherits a Colorado cabin and a trust — but only by completing a series of cryptic tasks set by a watchful lawyer she’s dangerously drawn to. Book 1 of the Lovesong Encore later-in-life romance series.

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.

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.

Dying of stage-four cancer and estranged from her grown daughter, Liz Millanova joins a hospital support group and forms a fierce chosen family with two fellow patients. A tender novel about mortality, reconciliation, and savoring what is left.

Eighty-eight-year-old Maud is small, frail, and utterly ruthless. When inconvenient people get in her way, she handles them — with the kind of decisive efficiency that only comes with age and absolutely nothing left to lose. Helene Tursten’s darkly comic stories are a love letter to the surprising freedom of extreme old age.

Maud is eighty-eight, and the assumption that an old woman could not possibly be dangerous continues to work entirely in her favor. The follow-up to An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good, and just as bleakly funny about what age makes invisible.

Steinem’s final memoir, published weeks after her death at 92. She returns to her early life and to the equal-rights movements she helped build, and looks forward rather than back — what the fight still needs, and who will carry it. The last chance to hear directly from the voice that shaped fifty years of American feminism.

After nearly three decades of motherhood, columnist Rita Lussier faces a sudden empty nest — rekindling her marriage and career while caring for aging parents. A memoir of midlife reinvention.

Registered dietitian and journalist Christy Harrison dismantles diet culture — the harmful system that profits from women’s food anxiety — and presents intuitive eating as a radical, evidence-based alternative. Especially relevant during menopause when diet-culture pressure often intensifies.

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.

Seventy-six-year-old Caro Spencer, a retired schoolteacher, is placed by her family in a rundown rural nursing home, where neglect and small cruelties threaten to erase her. In a secret journal she fights to hold onto her dignity, her memory, and her sense of self. May Sarton’s spare, searing novel is one of the most honest accounts ever written of institutional aging and the will to remain fully human.

Sarton’s last journal, published after her death. She is dying and knows it, and the writing narrows to essentials: pain, love, the sea, and the people who come and go. The closing volume of the longest sustained record we have of a woman growing very old in public.

The most buoyant of Sarton journals. She is seventy, with a full calendar of readings, a garden, new friendships, and the genuine surprise of finding this the best decade yet. Read alongside the later volumes it marks the high point, before illness enters the record.

Brené Brown maps 87 emotions and experiences — naming them precisely and explaining how language shapes connection, belonging, and wellbeing. An invaluable tool for women in midlife working to understand and articulate their complex emotional lives.

Springfield refuses to stay saved. A new mutation sends the women’s powers into dangerous, unstable spikes, and only Flygirl is unaffected. Racing to find a cause and a cure, she must cooperate with the very scientist who changed their lives, while romances, weddings, and divorces test whether these heroines can truly have it all.

Freshly divorced and adrift, Claire Emerson expects nothing from her sixtieth birthday — until an antique pendant from her grandson awakens a magical calling she never knew she carried. Lydia M. Hawke’s Crone Wars series is a satisfying inversion of the usual story: here the magic arrives with age, and a woman past sixty turns out to be the hero the world has been waiting for.