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 Outdated thinking about aging is.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.

Built on original doctoral research into why professional women over fifty are walking out of organizations that spent decades training them. Ryan names the triple bind of ageism, sexism and menopause without treating any of them as the individual woman problem to solve.

Margaret Fleming published her first book at eighty-eight, and she is still practicing as a psychotherapist. Rise covers a childhood destroyed by her father, a marriage spent trying to be normal, alcoholism and a near-fatal suicide attempt, and then the long rebuilding: sobriety, a degree in social work, a psychotherapy practice, an adoption agency for hard-to-place children, and coming out as a woman who loves women. She adopted the youngest of her ten children, a six-day-old infant, as a single mother in her late sixties.

Content note: this book describes incest and a suicide attempt.

Why it is here: Much of what Fleming survives happens long before fifty. It earns its place because it was written at eighty-eight, looking back across the whole of it, by a woman who kept recognizing second chances and taking them well into her sixties and beyond.

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.

Mitchell was fifty-eight, working for the NHS, when she was diagnosed with young-onset dementia. Written from inside the diagnosis rather than beside it, which is what makes it different from everything else on the subject.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gelman dismantled a settled life at forty-eight and kept moving for the next two decades, living with families rather than in hotels. A founding text for women who want the second half to be larger than the first, not smaller.

Poet Janet Mason reflects on the factory-working lives of her mother and grandmother in working-class Philadelphia while she cares for her mother through her final illness, and on the choices open to her as a lesbian daughter that were never open to her mother.

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.

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.