Books

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.

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.

From 1968 Greenwich Village through five decades of American upheaval, Anita Rappaport comes of age and grows old, sustained by the restorative power of female friendship. As she ages into her seventies, she confronts the title’s question head-on.

This is an anthology of works performed at the (now sadly defunct) Octopus Literary Salon in Oakland, California, at readings of erotica by women over fifty. The Dirty Old Women reading series pushes San Francisco Bay Area culture in the direction of celebrating sexuality after menopause. This volume is a varied collection from the readings, with stories, book excerpts, and poetry.

Full disclosure: My short story, “Terraforming,” is included in this collection. Many of the other stories were written by friends, so naturally I am fond of this volume for personal reasons as well as the fun read it undoubtedly is. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, or if you travel there, check out the Dirty Old Women reading schedule (usually the 4th Tuesday of the month).

Janina is a reclusive older woman living alone in the Polish mountains — a vegetarian, astrologer, and fierce lover of animals who begins to suspect that her missing neighbors are being killed by hunters. Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s darkly comic novel is a murder mystery in which the detective is an aging woman the world has already dismissed.

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 novel from Dawn French about Etta, a healthy, happy 68-year-old who gathers her family for a weekend and announces that today is her last day alive. Over the following twenty-four hours the family shares a surprising, darkly funny, and unexpectedly life-affirming day together — a celebration of a life fully lived.

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.

The Menopausal Superheroes step out of the shadows, and the pressure mounts on every front. As public scrutiny intensifies and their personal lives strain under the weight of secret identities, the women must navigate fresh dangers while holding together a fragile alliance and the relationships that matter most.

n this poignant tale, Jong interweaves the narrator’s sexual experience in her sixties with tales of her formerly glamorous parents as their health fails. As my own mother told me when she was in her nineties and I was in my sixties, “Enjoy your youth.”

Jong’s protagonist is determined to do just that. She works hard to reclaim the joys of her long-term marriage, and dances to the siren music of potential affairs. Ripe women have been dancing that tightrope for centuries without the benefit of literary models; Jong’s art makes visible what has been invisible. For those of us determined to prioritize our own erotic and creative lives, even while doing our best for aging parents and young adult children, this book holds up a mirror to the lives we are leading.

Two women in their 70s have been best friends since childhood, summering on a wild Maine peninsula they have vowed to protect from development. Alice Elliott Dark’s sweeping novel is about female friendship, legacy, secrets, and the question of what we owe the places and people we love most.

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.

Broke, eccentric, seventy-three-year-old Aurora drives to LA chasing a possible inheritance; her estranged, perfectionist forty-three-year-old daughter heads there to spy on her husband. Their quests collide over one chaotic, unexpectedly healing weekend. A sharp comic novel.

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.

A short-story collection in the Menopausal Superheroes series, gathering four original tales that fill the gaps between the novels. The stories trace the fraught relationship between Patricia, the Lizard Woman, and her former friend turned mad scientist Dr. Cindy Liu, exploring what it means to be a hero in midlife and beyond.

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.

Stripped of her magick, Claire alone knows the dark god Morok has infiltrated the Crones—and must recover her power in time to stop him. Book 3 of The Crone Wars urban fantasy series.

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.

A fictionalized life of Japanese poet Yosano Akiko, who defied her era’s constraints to become a pioneering feminist and the first to render The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese. Through poverty, betrayal, earthquake, and fire, her fierce devotion to art wounds her daughter — and she sets out to make amends before it’s too late.

Why it’s here: It follows Akiko across a whole life into older age — an unflinching portrait of a woman artist aging and trying to repair what her ambition cost.