Books

Growing older isn’t the problem. Outdated thinking about aging is.

ReSet is a practical guide for anyone in midlife and beyond who knows there must be more to this stage of life than slowing down and fading out. We are living longer, healthier, more capable lives than any generation before us, yet our beliefs about aging haven’t kept pace. From subtle workplace bias to the quiet voice telling us “I’m too old for that,” ageism shapes how we see ourselves and limits what we believe is possible.

ReSet challenges those assumptions and offers a new way forward — inviting readers to rethink aging, reconnect with their strengths, and design a life of purpose, curiosity, and contribution on their own terms.

A memoir of coming of age at sixty. After three decades homesteading and teaching in Vermont, Deborah Lee Luskin is gripped by an unlikely urge to learn to hunt — and, wrestling her fears and ambivalence, finds a new place for herself in the natural world.

When Joan Price lost her husband, she found there was no roadmap for rediscovering intimacy after such a loss — so she wrote one. Drawing on her own widowhood and the candid stories of other widows and widowers, this warm, practical guide treats sexuality as a healthy, life-affirming part of moving through grief, on your own timeline and in your own way.

Literary scholar Ruth O. Saxton reads across thirty works of fiction — from Barbara Pym and Doris Lessing to May Sarton, Margaret Drabble, and Jenny Diski — to ask how novelists imagine women in the last decades of life. She traces the difference between the diminished old lady of cultural stereotype and the vivid, still-becoming women some writers dare to portray. A perceptive, companionable guide to finding yourself on the page at any age.

A faith-based guide for adult children — most often daughters — caring for aging parents. Drawing on her own experience, Jane Daly offers practical help with the hard decisions and the harder moments, woven together with Christian encouragement about grace, forgiveness, and finding peace through the caregiving season.

Barbara Walker reclaims the ‘crone’ archetype from its derogatory associations, presenting the post-menopausal woman as a being of power, wisdom, and spiritual authority in pre-patriarchal traditions. A foundational feminist text on aging.

A former state senator and late-blooming ballroom dancer makes the case for staying vibrant through partner dance — including for those living with dementia or Parkinson’s.

Why it’s here: A resource rather than a memoir: practical, later-life inspiration for keeping body and spirit moving in the second half of life.

In this landmark work, Betty Friedan — author of The Feminine Mystique — turns her attention to what she calls the “age mystique”: the cultural insistence that growing older is only decline. Drawing on years of research and hundreds of interviews, she argues that the later decades can be a period of continued growth, purpose, and new freedom rather than a slow fade. Friedan dismantles stereotypes about work, sexuality, and care in old age, insisting that vitality after sixty is not the exception but the possibility. A foundational text for anyone rethinking what age can mean.

After feminist poet Marge Piercy suffers a medical emergency in 2022 and is revived, she spends the following year taking stock. Written at ninety in the Japanese zuihitsu form, this luminous journal braids diary, recipes, garden notes, and poetry into a celebration of a life in its ‘resurrected’ old age.

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.

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.

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.