Books

Neuroscientist Dr. Sarah McKay traces the female brain across the whole span of a woman’s life — from girlhood and the menstrual cycle through pregnancy, menopause, and old age — showing how hormones, experience, and biology shape the mind at every stage. For readers over 50, the later chapters on menopause and healthy brain aging are especially resonant, set in the fuller context of a lifetime.

Dr. Lisa Mosconi makes the case that women’s brains age differently — and that women account for roughly two-thirds of Alzheimer’s cases, in large part because of the hormonal shifts of menopause. Grounded in neuroscience, this is a practical roadmap for protecting your memory and cognitive health, with a special focus on the role of estrogen.

Joan Didion’s masterpiece on grief after the sudden death of her husband of 40 years. A lucid, devastating, and ultimately illuminating account of what it means to lose a life partner and face the future alone. Essential for any woman navigating widowhood or profound loss.

After an impoverished Jamaican childhood, immigration at fourteen, and years of abuse, Donna Marie Hayes built a Wall Street career and an off-Broadway show — then lost her savings to the ‘love of her life.’ A memoir of being scammed, and of reclaiming her power.

This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism by the dynamic Ashton Applewhite is a call to action on many fronts, beginning in our minds. As Ashton writes, “This book is a call to wake up to the ageism in and around us, embrace a more nuanced and accurate view of growing older, cheer up, and push back.
What ideas about aging have each of us internalized without even realizing it? How do they play out across our lives, from office to bedroom, in muscle and memory?
What can we do, individually and collectively, to catalyze a radical age movement to make it happen?
Let’s find out.”

I first learned about anti-ageism activist Ashton Applewhite through her terrific TED talk. She also led the team that developed Old School, a clearinghouse of anti-ageism resources.

The fact that she is out there doing good work, reminding us to include ourselves in the circle of those deserving equality, makes me happy and reminds me once again how important it is for older women to write our sexy stories.

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.

A poet, ‘a stranger to death,’ learns her brother is dying and confronts hidden family truths; before she can absorb his loss, her aging mother’s health fails. A meditation on grief, caregiving, and mortality.

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 candid, funny-but-brutal memoir-in-essays about the four years spent caring for a dying eighty-six-year-old father — refusing to romanticize caregiving or its toll on a family.

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.

A widowed nurse-midwife rebuilds her life through a medical mission in South Sudan, delivering babies in mud-walled clinics amid civil unrest and finding purpose in grief.

Why it’s here: Its narrator is 45 rather than 50+, but this widow’s grief-and-rebirth story of reinvention and purpose resonates well beyond her exact age.

Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön offers radical advice for facing life’s most painful moments — not by escaping them, but by moving toward them with openness. Profound comfort for women navigating divorce, loss, illness, or any form of transition.

Widowed at fifty-four and raising her neurodivergent son alone, Amy chronicles grief alongside an unexpected sensual reawakening — challenging the taboos around midlife female desire.

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.

Palliative care physician Kathryn Mannix has spent her career helping people die well. In this luminous book she shares the stories of patients and families navigating the end of life — and makes the case that dying, approached with honesty and preparation, can be peaceful rather than frightening. Essential reading for anyone who intends to grow old.

Suze Orman addresses the financial challenges unique to women — pay gaps, caregiving breaks, longer lifespans — with a concrete action plan for retirement, savings, and financial independence.

Mary Pipher, the psychologist who wrote Reviving Ophelia, turns her attention to older women in this luminous portrait of aging as a time of hard-won joy. Drawing on interviews and her own experience, she explores how women in their 60s, 70s, and beyond find meaning, resilience, and unexpected pleasure — even in the face of loss.

Half of romance readers are over fifty, yet few novels reflect their vivid lives. This roadmap shows you how to craft, edit, publish, and market a vibrant late-life love story. Your adventures as a late-life romance author begin here.

Lynette Reiling’s guide to the second half is built on William Bridges’ three-phase model of transition — the ending, the disorienting middle, the new beginning — and is meant to be read years before you think you need it. The middle gets the most attention and the most useful writing: the stretch Bridges called the Neutral Zone, where, as Reiling puts it, “I am no longer who I was, but do not yet know who I will become.” Eleven “script writing” tools follow, with questions and exercises for putting yourself back at the center of your own life. Practical rather than inspirational, and several readers describe working through it in groups.