Books

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.

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.

Tweit and her husband got his terminal brain-cancer diagnosis and decided to spend the time left travelling and looking at birds. A caregiving memoir that is honest about the tedium and indignity as well as the love. Winner of the Sarton Women Book Award.

When Janice Mason Steeves surveyed 138 artists aged 59 to 79 about their journeys into art, a pattern emerged: later life, far from being a barrier to creativity, can be an ideal time to begin. Weaving their stories with her own path from psychology to an international painting career, Steeves offers practical guidance and encouragement for anyone drawn to a creative life after 50.

Joan Didion’s follow-up to The Year of Magical Thinking turns to the death of her daughter Quintana and to Didion’s own aging body — the blue nights of the title, when daylight lingers longest but dark is coming. A meditation on parenthood, time, and the losses that accumulate as we grow older.

Yale psychologist Becca Levy has spent decades studying how our beliefs about aging shape the way we age. Her research is remarkable: people with more positive views of their own aging live, on average, 7.5 years longer. Breaking the Age Code is both the science and the practical guide to changing how you think about getting older.

Sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski explain why women experience burnout differently than men, and offer science-backed strategies for completing the stress cycle and recovering your wellbeing. Essential for women who have spent decades caregiving, working, and putting themselves last.

New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast turns her signature anxious wit on the hardest subject: her elderly parents’ final years. This graphic memoir is funny, wrenching, and utterly honest about the mess of aging parents, overwhelmed adult children, and the things families can’t quite say out loud. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Executive coach and life strategist Dr. Susan R. Meyer gathers the stories of thirty-eight women — from their late sixties into their nineties — who are living with vitality, courage, and joy. Through intimate interviews she draws out eight qualities behind a vibrant later life: resilience, persistence, curiosity, bricolage, fearlessness, legacy, fun, and connection. A warm rebuttal to the idea that women grow less visible or less relevant with age.

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.

Raffelock argues for a third archetype beyond maiden and mother: the woman whose creative and public life begins in earnest after fifty. Against the framing of midlife women as used up, defeminized or invisible.

Thirteen qualities Bolen argues are worth cultivating in the crone years, from a Jungian analyst who spent a career arguing that older women have archetypal authority rather than a diminished share of the young ones. A companion to her Goddesses in Older Women.

Penelope Lively, in her late 70s, reflects on memory, reading, objects, and the experience of having lived a long life. Part memoir, part meditation on what persists when so much has changed, this is a writer’s accounting of what age has clarified and what it has taken away.

Research professor Brené Brown’s guide to courageous leadership — vulnerability, trust, difficult conversations, and clarity of values. Powerful for women at any stage of their careers or community involvement, including those taking on leadership roles in midlife.

Brené Brown’s landmark work on vulnerability — how the willingness to be seen, to take risks, and to embrace imperfection is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, and creativity. Transformative for women who have spent decades in shame-driven perfectionism.

Gail Sheehy, author of the landmark Passages, tells her own story: coming of age in postwar America, building a journalism career, navigating love and loss, and arriving at the second half of life with the same fierce curiosity she brought to her decades of reporting on how Americans grow and change.

In this Taschen book (if you don’t know Benedikt Tashen’s outstanding publishing house, you should) Liz Earls talks of divorce, turning fifty and how these events changed her view of the world. If you are a woman who enjoys younger men, either to look at or to embrace, this book may be a great motivator for your writing.  Liz Earls shares sexy explicit photographs of her adventures with younger men in this uninhibited (and VERY Not Safe For Work)  collection.  Her verve is unmistakable.

One day I woke up and there was a seventy-year-old woman in my bed. Two long essays on women and ageing from a writer who spent her sixties and seventies refusing the script. Steinem is direct about what changes, what does not, and why she found these decades freer than the ones before — the most squarely on-topic book she wrote.

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.

Written at sixty with terminal brain cancer, in a matter of weeks. Taylor is unillusioned about dying, angry about having no legal means to choose her moment, and very clear-eyed about her parents deaths as rehearsal for her own.

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.

Geriatrician Louise Aronson spent 25 years caring for older patients before writing this Pulitzer finalist — part memoir, part manifesto — arguing that America’s medical system is failing its elders and that old age deserves to be treated as a distinct, valuable stage of human life, not a problem to be managed.