Books

At 72, after a divorce, profound loss and decades without intimacy, Andrea Feinberg made an online dating profile. What follows is the account of what happened next — the men of every age who pursued her, the encounters that were funny, the ones that were flatly disappointing, and the confidence that turned up unannounced somewhere in the middle. She spent a career as a marketing MBA and started writing erotica in her seventies, and the same plainness runs through this: no euphemism, no apology for wanting what she wants. Less a book about sex than about what becomes available to a woman who stops accepting that the door has closed.

Diana Athill wrote this memoir of old age at about 89: on sex and its fading, on letting go of what cannot be kept, and on the approach of death, without consolation or self-pity. Winner of the 2008 Costa Biography Award.

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.

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.

Dr. Ogden was a professional who wrote with wisdom and compassion about how women reclaim their sexuality after midlife, in spite of social pressures, and in many cases in spite of a history of abuse. She has spent a lifetime developing her understanding of how we construct meaning about our sexuality and how we develop our sexual relationships. Readers of this book gain the benefit of her insights. Our relationships with ourselves are her ultimate concern.

Intimacy coach Nathalie Dewalhens names a new archetype — the Sensual Crone — for the woman whose desire didn’t vanish at menopause but grew weirder, wilder, and more interesting. Finished on her sixtieth birthday, this frank, unsugarcoated set of five truths runs from vaginal atrophy to neo-tantra to a hotel room in Bruges, insisting that erotic life after reproduction is a beginning, not an epilogue.

Allende at seventy-eight on feminism, impatient love, rage, and what a long life teaches a woman about her own appetite. Short, unhedged, and addressed directly to women rather than about them.

Joan Price is the foremost advocate for older people’s sexuality, and this is her definitive guide — covering everything from the physiological changes of menopause to navigating desire after illness, disability, or divorce. Frank, warm, and non-judgmental, it treats older women’s sexual lives with the seriousness they deserve.

The first of twelve linked romances set on an Australian island where nobody minds their own business. Celia Hart has kept her life orderly and entirely her own affair; Gavin Pike notices more than he says; the island notices everything. Late-life romance played for warmth and heat rather than wistfulness.

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.

Widowed at fifty-four and raising her neurodivergent son alone, Amy chronicles grief alongside an unexpected sensual reawakening — challenging the taboos around midlife female desire.