Books

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.

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.

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.

Book two of the Veil of Time series. Maggie has built a careful, predictable life back in the present, but the past has not finished with her. A sudden vision pulls her through time again, into a world of ancient power and shifting loyalties — and back to Fergus, the warrior prince she never forgot. Political tension is rising, a dangerous alliance threatens his family, and her hold on the past is more fragile than before; she has to decide how much she will risk for a love that crosses centuries.

Why it’s here: Historical fantasy rather than a story of later life, published by Sibylline Digital First — women authors over 50. It belongs here for its middle book’s question, which is a familiar one after fifty: whether the safe, predictable life you assembled is the one you actually want.

Book one of the Veil of Time series. After losing her daughter, Maggie retreats to the Scottish countryside and the shadow of ancient Dunadd Fort. When she stops taking the medication that has controlled her seizures — and dulled her feelings — she begins slipping into another time, where the ruined fort stands whole and the past is alive. Taken in at the court of Queen Brighde by Fergus, a grieving prince, she finds feelings stirring that she thought were finished, and a life she does not want to leave. With a life-altering surgery waiting in the present, she has to choose between the world she knows and the one that feels like home.

Why it’s here: A time-slip romance rather than a book about aging, from Sibylline Digital First, whose list is women authors over 50. It earns its place as a story about a woman rebuilding after devastating loss and discovering that desire, purpose and a second life were never actually behind her.

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.

When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Photographer Jo Blackwell put that question to hundreds of women and photographed 166 of them exactly as they are — no make-up, no styling, no filters — each portrait paired with the woman’s own words about growing older, being seen, and letting go of unrealistic expectations. Featured by the BBC, it is not a glossy “embrace ageing” book; it is a quiet, truthful record of older faces, and an argument that every one of them is worth looking at.

Why it’s here: The portraits begin at forty, not fifty — but the project’s whole subject is the visibility and self-acceptance the second half of life demands, and its honest older faces are the point.

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.