Books

The foundational text on grief and the stages that have helped millions of people understand their own mourning. Essential for women navigating loss of parents, spouses, health, identity, and roles that often cluster in midlife.

The fifth volume in Cathleen Rountree’s acclaimed series on women’s life stages gathers candid interviews and luminous black-and-white portraits of sixteen women in their seventies — among them Doris Lessing, Betty Friedan, Madeleine L’Engle, and Liz Smith. Each reflects on creativity, loss, love, work, and the freedoms that arrive with age. A warm, frank chorus that reframes turning seventy as a passage into wisdom and possibility.

After discovering her husband’s affair, Dorothy Freed packed up her sons, drove from upstate New York to California, and gave herself over to a new life. Perfect Strangers is her wry, candid memoir of sexual awakening in the free-love San Francisco of the mid-1970s — a woman past the expected age claiming her own desire and independence. Freed set the manuscript aside for decades before publishing it in her later years.

A fiftysomething ad executive leaves San Francisco to rebuild a 300-year-old stone barn in rural Italy — and, amid a breast-cancer diagnosis, builds a joyful late-life reinvention.

In 1988, at age 50, Helen Thayer became the first woman to travel on foot to the magnetic North Pole — 364 miles over 27 days, with only her husky Charlie for company and protection against the polar bears. Her account of that journey, and of the bond with the dog who kept her alive, is a bracing reminder of what midlife courage can look like.

From a sheltered Baptist girlhood to a semester in Colombia and travels across more than forty countries, Suzanne LaVenture learns to question her inherited beliefs. A warm, funny memoir of love, faith, and self-discovery.

Why it’s here: A woman in the second half of life looks back on a lifetime of wandering and the faith she questioned and remade along the way.

Grammy-winning vocalist Darlene Koldenhoven — the tambourine-waving nun of Sister Act and a soloist on Yanni: Live at the Acropolis — looks back on nearly fifty years in show business, from a strict Chicago girlhood to the world’s great stages.

Psychologist and Buddhist teacher Tara Brach offers radical acceptance — of ourselves, our bodies, our pain — as the foundation of healing and freedom. Essential for women who have spent decades judging themselves and are ready to stop.

When her charismatic, difficult mother Jane chooses to end her life at seventy-five, Susannah Kennedy inherits forty-five years of secret diaries. Over a year of reading them, she reckons with memory, grief, and the mother she thought she knew.

Jennifer L. Butz launched WonderCrone after colliding head-on with ageism at sixty, and Rebel Aging is her witty, clear-eyed reckoning with the myths women are handed about life after fifty. Part manifesto, part mirror, part marching orders, it reframes aging not as a descent but as a return — to voice, to vision, to self. Through personal stories, cultural critique, and a few well-placed shenanigans, Butz exposes how ageism shows up in our bodies, work, and relationships, and makes the case that wonder, wisdom, and purpose beat the lie of “anti-aging” every time. A rallying cry for reclaiming your edges, your joy, and your seat at any table.

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.

A dual-timeline memoir braiding a pioneering whitewater-kayaking career with the author’s post-menopause, post-retirement plunge into first-time parenting of an at-risk young nephew.

Essays on creativity, beauty, purpose, and power for women after sixty. Featuring profiles of trailblazing women and questions for reflection, Rock On invites readers to reignite their creative spark, advocate for better healthcare, make confident money choices, and live out loud.

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.

Yes, this is the same Gail Sheehy whose book Passages was such a hit. Here, Sheehy focuses in on women’s sexuality after midlife, using the same combination of narrative and interviews that she employed in her earlier blockbuster book. Sex and the Seasoned Woman  ranges across the United States, providing a State of the Union for what older women are thinking and doing about their sexuality. From rural sex toy parties to Southern cougars to New England women recommitting to long term relationships, it is all here. This book reminds us to remember the so-called “flyover” states – there are plenty of women past midlife nowhere near an ocean who celebrate their sexuality, each in her own way.

At 72, after a divorce, profound loss and decades without intimacy, Andrea Feinberg made an online dating profile. What follows is the account of what happened next — the men of every age who pursued her, the encounters that were funny, the ones that were flatly disappointing, and the confidence that turned up unannounced somewhere in the middle. She spent a career as a marketing MBA and started writing erotica in her seventies, and the same plainness runs through this: no euphemism, no apology for wanting what she wants. Less a book about sex than about what becomes available to a woman who stops accepting that the door has closed.

A psychologist recounts her turbulent thirty-year marriage to a Hollywood screenwriter; when he dies, she moves into widowhood and grief. A late-life reckoning with a long marriage and its loss.

A practical and emotional guide for women who find themselves suddenly single after 50 — whether through divorce, widowhood, or the end of a long-term relationship. Addresses finances, housing, identity, dating, and rebuilding a life.

You remember Erica Jong: She who broke new ground with Fear of Flying, a 1973 novel that startled men and women at the time with its directness about female sexuality. Jong revisited sexuality in her 2015 novel Fear of Dying, which explores the sexual desire of a woman in her sixties. But before that novel, Jong edited this anthology of stories and essays by women of many ages about their sexual lives.

One of the loveliest things about this collection is the seamlessness of sexual experience across the stages of life; there is no pretense of reserving sexuality for the young. Read this book for the diverse ways women explore and describe and grow from erotic experience, throughout the lifespan. Every kind of experience, from purely physical release to sex as communion with spirit, is celebrated here.

The writer biographies at the back of the book hint at the kind of community we can build among ripe women awake to our eroticism.

The definitive guide for families caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s or other dementias. Practical, compassionate, and comprehensive — a must-have for the millions of women who are dementia caregivers, usually for a parent or spouse.

The classic 12-week program for recovering your creative self. Particularly powerful for women in midlife who have spent decades putting others first and are ready to reclaim — or discover for the first time — their creative lives.

The Atlas of Beauty is indeed an atlas, with women from all over the world shown in their environment, the garments they wear, and with representatives of all sizes, ages, and cultures.

The women engage us with their direct gazes, making themselves real to us across distance and culture.

A truly fascinating look at women across the globe.

Sonya Renee Taylor’s powerful call for radical self-love challenges us to examine how body shame and sizeism shape our lives — and offers a framework for rejecting these systems. Particularly valuable for women navigating body changes in midlife.