Books

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.

Stella Fosse’s smart, sexy novel drops three accomplished women scientists — a biology professor, a chemist, and a patent-lawyer/engineer — into the San Francisco biotech scene, where they discover they’ve all been dating the same charming con man, a fraudster stealing their research along with their hearts. Comparing notes, they reach one conclusion: getting rich is the best revenge. First Wives Club meets The Witches of Eastwick, with older women firmly in charge of the story.

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.

A prequel to Dakota Blues, exploring Karen Grace’s earlier life and the career and marriage pressures that precede her midlife road trip.

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.

With great power comes great frustration. As the newly transformed women adjust to life as superheroes, Patricia presses on alone to find the woman who changed them, while Jessica and Linda train with a covert agency known as The Department. Old threats resurface, and controlling their new abilities proves harder than any of them expected.

Former 1980s rock hopeful Libby Conlin has long since buried her music — until her newly divorced daughter posts the old recordings online and the industry comes calling. As her past resurfaces, mother and daughter remake their lives in a story about second acts and redefining love.

A spicy, satirical romp about a sixty-something woman who stumbles into a digital trap and comes out the other side owning her desire and her power. Billie Best skewers the culture’s assumptions about older women and sex, insisting with wit and nerve that a woman’s sensual life is far from over at 60.

Willa Drake is 61 when a phone call upends her settled life and sends her across the country to help a near-stranger. Anne Tyler’s novel is a gentle meditation on reinvention, on the ways we close ourselves off, and on what it takes to start over in the second half of life.

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.

Claire ventures alone through the treacherous god realm to rescue her trapped protector before Morok finds the ancient Crone magic hidden there. Book 4 of The Crone Wars.

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.

Everything is tickety-boo at The Green Meadows retirement village until Cynthia’s dear friend accidentally witnesses a murder and, in shock, cannot remember a thing. With a security guard and a young detective in tow, Cynthia sets about reconstructing what he saw before the killer reaches the next name on the list. Book two, pitched squarely at the Thursday Murder Club reader: senior sleuths, real friendship, and a body that has gone missing.

Karen Grace is far from home and newly unemployed when she agrees to take an elderly neighbor on one last road trip in a vintage RV. Along the way she confronts the truth about her marriage and begins reinventing her life at fifty. First book in the later-in-life Dakota Blues series.

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.