Books

Media scholar Susan J. Douglas examines how women who came of age in the 1960s and ‘70s are now rewriting the script for older womanhood — rejecting the invisibility and passivity assigned to them by culture while honestly confronting the realities of aging. A sociological portrait of a generation refusing to go quietly.

The original, evidence-based guide to making peace with food. The 10 principles of intuitive eating help women stop the binge-restrict cycle and reconnect with their body’s natural hunger and fullness signals — a vital skill during hormonal transition.

Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, adapted her famous creativity tools for people in retirement or any major life transition. Weekly tasks, morning pages, and artist’s dates — all recalibrated for the particular challenge of reinventing yourself when the structure of a career falls away.

At sixty-five, Rebecca Knuth walks away from the security of academia to reinvent herself in London — enrolling in a writing program, training as a guide, and reclaiming her voice as her mother’s health fails.

Fifty-two true accounts from people who had decided their romantic chapter was closed — widowed, divorced, discouraged, or simply tired of looking. Relationship coach Nancy Ripp White collects the meetings that happened anyway: a laundry room, a high-school flame resurfacing, a message arriving on an ordinary Tuesday. What runs through all of them is what she argues younger love rarely teaches — depth, clarity, gratitude, and a sharp sense of what time is worth.

The complications are here too, not smoothed over: adult children with opinions, blended families, grief that has not finished, independence nobody wants to hand back. Almost every story opens the same way — “I wasn’t looking” — and White’s point is that they were living, and love met them there.

After decades of depression, addiction, and self-loathing, Maeve DuVally got sober and, as a public-facing communications executive at Goldman Sachs, took the hardest step of coming out as her true self. To her surprise the firm embraced her, and a New York Times profile launched a new life as a role model.

Why it’s here: Maeve steps fully into herself in her late fifties — a later-life memoir of reinvention and courage from a woman who refused to run out the clock as someone she wasn’t.

Literary scholar Susan Gubar was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in her mid-60s and chose to document what she calls being “debulked” — the brutal surgery that extended her life but transformed her body. This memoir is rigorous, unsentimental, and deeply moving: a reckoning with mortality, medicine, and the will to keep living and writing.

A board-certified menopause practitioner shares everything she tells her patients, covering hot flashes, sleep disruption, vaginal changes, sexual health, bone loss, and heart disease risk. Clear, accessible, and reassuring.

A comprehensive visual reference covering every aspect of the menopausal transition — symptoms, medical treatments, complementary therapies, and lifestyle strategies — in an accessible, illustrated format.

British television presenter Davina McCall and Dr. Naomi Potter team up to deliver a comprehensive, positive guide to menopause — covering HRT, symptoms, lifestyle, and the significant shift in how menopause is understood and treated in the UK.

Gloria Steinem spent decades traveling for the feminist movement — organizing, speaking, listening, agitating. Her memoir of those years on the road is also a meditation on why travel and conversation are themselves political acts, and on the communities of women who changed American life one room at a time.

At sixty, long-married psychotherapist Leah Fisher negotiates a year-long ‘marriage sabbatical’ of solo global travel — an alternative to gray divorce, and a reclaiming of self within a marriage.

Over a ten-year search, the author comes to know the Cuban-exile father she barely knew, alongside an adopted Cherokee-Jewish soldier father and an Iranian stepfather — each a different version of love and absence. Confronting inherited wounds, she dismantles the myths she carried about her fathers and herself.

Why it’s here: A woman in her later life pieces together three fathers and her own inheritance — a mature reckoning with family and identity.

After her father’s death and divorce from her husband of two decades, Rachel leaves a thirty-year career and navigates a year of disastrous midlife dating — dark, wry, and ultimately hopeful.

In this book, Joan Price continues to explore late life sexuality. Joan’s grief over the death of her husband, and her creative ways to address her sexuality after that loss, are significant in this volume.

Joan also addresses how we continue to be sexual when our health issues, or the health of our partners, become challenges in our sexual expression.

William Blake wrote that “joy and pain are woven fine,” and in Naked at Our Age, Joan Price helps us ensure that the joy remains woven into the pattern of our lives.

Anna Quindlen became a grandmother at sixty-four, and found herself in territory no amount of parenting had prepared her for — no longer the decision-maker, now a supporting player in her grandson’s life. Her warm, honest essays trace the unexpected pleasures and complicated emotions of the role, and reflect on what it means to watch your own child become a parent.

Chicana playwright and activist Cherríe Moraga braids her own coming-of-age and coming out with the story of her mother, Elvira, and Elvira’s long decline into Alzheimer’s. It is a memoir about memory, inheritance, and the grief of watching a parent fade — and, through one family, a larger reckoning with Mexican American identity and belonging.

Drawing on her PhD in cellular immunology, Ehrenreich argues that much of modern preventive medicine, wellness culture, and the anti-aging industry sells false control over a body and a mortality we cannot ultimately command. She examines how the immune system can itself abet disease, and makes the case for accepting the limits of medicine and the certainty of death rather than killing ourselves to live longer.

Dr. Stacy Sims applies her female physiology expertise specifically to the menopausal transition, with training and nutrition protocols designed to maintain strength, power, and athletic performance through and beyond menopause.

Maggie Kuhn founded the Gray Panthers at 65 after being forced to retire from her job — and spent the next two decades as one of America’s most formidable activists for the rights of older people. Her autobiography is a testament to what becomes possible when a woman stops accepting what she’s told and starts organizing.

Gail Collins surveys three centuries of American history to show that older women have always been more influential, more inventive, and more powerful than the culture acknowledges. From colonial grandmothers to suffragists to modern activists, No Stopping Us Now recovers a hidden history of elder women who refused to step aside.

A childless woman in her late fifties tells the unvarnished truth of caring for her older husband as Alzheimer’s dismantles the retirement they’d planned on the Oregon coast.

Southern women artists and writers — painters, sculptors, novelists, poets — reflect on creativity, aging, and what it means to keep making things as the years accumulate. Edited by Jay Lamar and Jennifer Horne, this anthology is a testament to the creative life as a lifelong practice, not something that fades at a certain age.

Journalist Margaret Webb sets out to run a marathon at 50 and discovers a world of women athletes defying aging. Packed with science and inspiring stories proving fitness peaks are not behind us.