Books

Grammy-winning vocalist Darlene Koldenhoven — the tambourine-waving nun of Sister Act and a soloist on Yanni: Live at the Acropolis — looks back on nearly fifty years in show business, from a strict Chicago girlhood to the world’s great stages.

You remember Erica Jong: She who broke new ground with Fear of Flying, a 1973 novel that startled men and women at the time with its directness about female sexuality. Jong revisited sexuality in her 2015 novel Fear of Dying, which explores the sexual desire of a woman in her sixties. But before that novel, Jong edited this anthology of stories and essays by women of many ages about their sexual lives.

One of the loveliest things about this collection is the seamlessness of sexual experience across the stages of life; there is no pretense of reserving sexuality for the young. Read this book for the diverse ways women explore and describe and grow from erotic experience, throughout the lifespan. Every kind of experience, from purely physical release to sex as communion with spirit, is celebrated here.

The writer biographies at the back of the book hint at the kind of community we can build among ripe women awake to our eroticism.

During the Great Depression, young dancers Mattie and Kip tap for coins and ride the rails until betrayal and disaster separate them for a lifetime. Now ninety-nine, Mattie finally tells her granddaughter the whole story.

The classic 12-week program for recovering your creative self. Particularly powerful for women in midlife who have spent decades putting others first and are ready to reclaim — or discover for the first time — their creative lives.

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.

Alma Cruz, a novelist in her sixties, retires from teaching and writing and buries her unfinished manuscripts in a plot of land, whereupon the characters begin to talk. A book about what a completed career leaves undone, written by Alvarez at seventy-four.

Southern women in a locked-down senior community reinvent their love lives in thirteen tales of friendly vampires, sexy demons, and dream lovers — plus eight bonus stories of vibrant women from New York to California.

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.

Sarton in her mid-sixties, newly settled in a house above the Maine shore, keeping the daily account of weather, flowers, visitors and work that became the model for a whole genre of later-life writing. Quieter than Journal of a Solitude, and considerably warmer.

At 72, the widow Mary Delany picked up a pair of scissors and a piece of black paper and invented an entirely new art form — the paper mosaic. Molly Peacock’s biography of this forgotten Georgian genius is also a meditation on late-life creativity: what becomes possible when the social obligations of a lifetime finally lift.

Poems written after the death of Peacock’s husband, refusing what she calls the received idea of a widow’s mauve existence. Covers the long caregiving before the loss as well as the color that returns after it.

Unmasked: Women Write about Sex and Intimacy After Fifty

This book is part fiction, part essay, part poetry. The project was designed to help raise the level of visibility of the sexuality of women past fifty, and includes a wide variety of styles and approaches. The poems have some great lines to launch our thoughts into new creations.

I can’t do better than quote the authors “This collection of essays and poetry is meant to bring sex after fifty for women into the open, to proclaim that it is important, it is natural and healthy and, for some women, it is absolutely necessary. Unmasked will surprise, inform, and–it is hoped–encourage all women of a certain age to (re)discover their sexuality.”

Read this book to spark your thinking as well as your artistic side.

Shunned as a medieval healer and rescued by a vampire, Marion Chase joins a sisterhood devoted to ethical living. Five centuries later she runs a Chicago blood bank with a hidden sideline — until she falls for the one person who could destroy her.

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.