Books

Growing older isn’t the problem. Outdated thinking about aging is.

ReSet is a practical guide for anyone in midlife and beyond who knows there must be more to this stage of life than slowing down and fading out. We are living longer, healthier, more capable lives than any generation before us, yet our beliefs about aging haven’t kept pace. From subtle workplace bias to the quiet voice telling us “I’m too old for that,” ageism shapes how we see ourselves and limits what we believe is possible.

ReSet challenges those assumptions and offers a new way forward — inviting readers to rethink aging, reconnect with their strengths, and design a life of purpose, curiosity, and contribution on their own terms.

A memoir of coming of age at sixty. After three decades homesteading and teaching in Vermont, Deborah Lee Luskin is gripped by an unlikely urge to learn to hunt — and, wrestling her fears and ambivalence, finds a new place for herself in the natural world.

When Joan Price lost her husband, she found there was no roadmap for rediscovering intimacy after such a loss — so she wrote one. Drawing on her own widowhood and the candid stories of other widows and widowers, this warm, practical guide treats sexuality as a healthy, life-affirming part of moving through grief, on your own timeline and in your own way.

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.

Nelson is a Tufts researcher published in JAMA and the NEJM, and this is the evidence-based end of a shelf otherwise dominated by reversal claims. Directed specifically at women facing postmenopausal bone loss.

Literary scholar Ruth O. Saxton reads across thirty works of fiction — from Barbara Pym and Doris Lessing to May Sarton, Margaret Drabble, and Jenny Diski — to ask how novelists imagine women in the last decades of life. She traces the difference between the diminished old lady of cultural stereotype and the vivid, still-becoming women some writers dare to portray. A perceptive, companionable guide to finding yourself on the page at any age.

A faith-based guide for adult children — most often daughters — caring for aging parents. Drawing on her own experience, Jane Daly offers practical help with the hard decisions and the harder moments, woven together with Christian encouragement about grace, forgiveness, and finding peace through the caregiving season.

Barbara Walker reclaims the ‘crone’ archetype from its derogatory associations, presenting the post-menopausal woman as a being of power, wisdom, and spiritual authority in pre-patriarchal traditions. A foundational feminist text on aging.

A former state senator and late-blooming ballroom dancer makes the case for staying vibrant through partner dance — including for those living with dementia or Parkinson’s.

Why it’s here: A resource rather than a memoir: practical, later-life inspiration for keeping body and spirit moving in the second half of life.

In this landmark work, Betty Friedan — author of The Feminine Mystique — turns her attention to what she calls the “age mystique”: the cultural insistence that growing older is only decline. Drawing on years of research and hundreds of interviews, she argues that the later decades can be a period of continued growth, purpose, and new freedom rather than a slow fade. Friedan dismantles stereotypes about work, sexuality, and care in old age, insisting that vitality after sixty is not the exception but the possibility. A foundational text for anyone rethinking what age can mean.

After feminist poet Marge Piercy suffers a medical emergency in 2022 and is revived, she spends the following year taking stock. Written at ninety in the Japanese zuihitsu form, this luminous journal braids diary, recipes, garden notes, and poetry into a celebration of a life in its ‘resurrected’ old age.

Sarton in her mid-sixties, newly settled in a house above the Maine shore, keeping the daily account of weather, flowers, visitors and work that became the model for a whole genre of later-life writing. Quieter than Journal of a Solitude, and considerably warmer.

The book that broke the public silence on menopause, reported rather than confessed, at a point when the subject was still largely absent from medicine and entirely absent from conversation. Dated in places and foundational anyway.

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.

Margareta Magnusson offers warm, practical, and often funny advice for aging joyfully while accepting its losses. Drawing on her life in Sweden and abroad, she encourages readers to stay curious, welcome new technology and younger people, let go of what no longer matters, and remain open to fresh pleasures.

A collected, illustrated gathering of Steinem’s sharpest lines, with new essays framing them, published when she was eighty-five. Short enough to dip into and quotable by design — five decades of organising distilled into the sentences people actually remember.

Award-winning writer Wendi Knox reframes aging as “becoming more of who you are, not less of what you were.” Sparked by a midlife reckoning and the symbolism of the dragonfly — which gains its wings late in life — the book offers nine “Dragonflying Lessons,” with exercises to help women escape cultural ageism and reclaim their voice and visibility.

Journalist Melinda Blau draws lessons from nine women in their nineties and hundreds whose lives challenge stereotypes about old age. Their friendships reveal the sustaining power of curiosity, purpose, gratitude, humor, resilience, and connection across generations.

In this is who I am: our beauty in all shapes and sizes pictures of women up to age 95, unclothed, with a statement by each woman, form the basis of this photographic essay book.  It is a beautiful book that reminds us to love and cherish the great gifts that are our bodies:  So much of what these women wrote concerns their worries about the appearance of their bodies. 

The contrast between their beauty and their worries is poignant.

From chartered psychologist Dr. Denise Taylor, ThriveSpan is a reflective, research-grounded guide to later life — charting a more conscious path through aging where wellbeing, purpose, and reflection meet. Drawing on psychology, lived experience, and the restorative influence of nature, it reframes growing older as a season to walk gently into what matters now.

A registered dietitian’s warm, anti-diet guide to being at home in a changing body. Deb Benfield untangles the “anti-aging” and wellness messaging that puts older women at war with themselves, offering a way to nourish and trust your body — through food, movement, and mindfulness — rather than police it.

Thayer was sixty-three, and her husband seventy-four, when they walked sixteen hundred miles across the Gobi in summer. She is matter-of-fact about the physical arithmetic of doing this at that age, which is exactly what makes it useful.

This visually stunning book includes photographs and quotes from women in from their sixties all the way to a hundred years of age.  Some of these women are well-known and others are obscure.  All show the beauty of women as we grow in age and wisdom.  Try this book as a stimulus to your own creativity as a writer and artist.

Marienau and Zelitzky have spent years interviewing women between seventy and one hundred and ten for their podcast, and this is the book that came out of it: artists, activists and entrepreneurs who are visibly not finished. Built against the assumption that the later decades are a subtraction.