Books

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.

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.

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.

A powerful corrective to decades of fear around hormone therapy. Presents the science showing estrogen is safe and beneficial for most women. Essential before any HRT decision.

At fifty-eight, just out of her longest relationship, Carolyn Lee Arnold decided not to look for a partner but to gather data — fifty first dates, tracked and reflected on, to work out what she actually wanted rather than what she had settled for twice before.

What follows is candid about desire, about dating as an older woman in the San Francisco Bay Area, and about the unexpected discovery that the project itself was the point.

Drawn from the lives of fifty women who built rewarding lives on their own terms, Dr. Susan R. Meyer’s guide distills seven key factors for creating the life you deserve — at any age. Her subjects span Fortune 100 executives, entrepreneurs, a home health aide, and a retired saleswoman, and among them have weathered job loss, divorce, illness, and widowhood. Part inspiration, part practical roadmap for reinvention in the second half of life.

When we write about sex, we often focus on the emotion it evokes – which is important and entirely understandable. Writing about sex itself, as a physical and sensory experience, it is easy to stumble into mechanistic descriptions. But in Free Fall, Rae Padilla writes sex scenes of unparalleled power and immediacy. Her language is gorgeous and her skill with a sentence will stop you cold. She immerses us in the visceral experience of this late life love affair, and then explores the countervailing pull of the narrator’s responsibilities to career and to an immensely demanding family life. If you have been ambushed by lust in your ripe years, if your desire has gone off like fireworks in the lives of the people around you, this story is sure to resonate. Free Fall is a book to relish first of all, and then to study for its lessons about the creative process. This book is a master course in writing about ripe love.

At forty-eight, after her husband comes out, a Manhattan psychologist sets out to reclaim her sexuality and shed decades of shame. A candid midlife awakening.

Why it’s here: Alisa is 48 — just under our line — but this is a midlife reclamation of self after a long marriage ends, squarely a woman’s second-act terrain.

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.

Bestselling ghostwriter Samantha Rose steps out of the shadows to unravel the mystery of her mother’s suicide. As her mother seems to return ‘from beyond’ to explain her choice, this raw, darkly funny memoir explores mental health, mother-daughter love, and writing forward after loss.

Why it’s here: At its center is an older mother’s life and death, and a daughter’s reckoning with the woman she thought she knew. (Sensitive: suicide.)

In this follow-up to her classic Goddesses in Everywoman, Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen turns to the years after fifty, naming four “crone” archetypes — Metis, Sophia, Hecate, and Hestia — that embody different faces of wisdom, intuition, and spiritual depth. She reframes growing older as a rich third act rather than a decline, and closes by encouraging older women to gather in circles and become a force for change. A thoughtful companion for any woman looking for meaning and power in her later decades.

Sex educator Tracey Cox writes frankly and practically about sex in the second half of life — what changes physiologically, what doesn’t have to change, and how to build a satisfying sex life well past 50. An honest, cheerful, and genuinely useful guide for women who refuse to believe the best is behind them.

A delightful, illustrated guide to the digestive system — including the gut microbiome’s role in immunity, mental health, and hormonal balance. Menopause dramatically shifts gut bacteria, making this essential background reading.

Muriel A. Murch recounts leaving Los Angeles with her film-editor husband for a farm in West Marin, where family life intertwines with organic farming and the Bay Area’s independent film world. A poetic tribute to land, work, and community.

At fifty-nine, after a lifetime of depression, Anne is unexpectedly lifted by a Springsteen concert. At sixty she quits teaching and books a solo twenty-six-day trip following his Australian tour — a late-life adventure that changes her.

In this frank, funny midlife memoir, Billie Best tells the truth about a life that looked perfect from the outside. Widowed after 32 years of marriage and rattling around her dream house, she uncovers her late husband’s affair and slowly learns to release the past and rebuild herself. A gutsy, resilient story for any woman who has had to downsize, start over, and reinvent her life.

Nora Ephron’s wickedly funny essays about the indignities and joys of getting older as a woman. From bad hair days to the terrors of the medicine cabinet, she makes aging not just bearable but hilarious.

Nora Ephron’s final essay collection looks squarely at aging and memory with her characteristic wry precision. She writes about what she can no longer remember, what she wishes she’d said, and the strange experience of watching her own life become something that already happened. Funny, melancholy, and completely honest.