Books

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.

On the cusp of sixty, thrice-married Arden Rice must reckon with a lifetime of reckless choices when tragedy makes her guardian of her vulnerable granddaughter. A late-life redemption story.

In the fictional Northern California city of San Andreas de Pacifico, the ground is literally unstable — and so are the people in these twelve linked love stories. A long-married couple scales a cemetery wall to reignite their passion; an old man losing himself to dementia finds an abandoned baby; a struggling writer finds freedom trying to rescue a beached whale. Award-winning author Ericka Lutz (The Edge of Maybe) writes with an unflinching, lyrical voice about connection, vulnerability, and the fault lines beneath ordinary lives.

Why it’s here: This collection spans the whole arc of a life rather than focusing only on older women, but its older characters — the assisted-living residents, the man facing dementia, the women reaching late in life for passion and meaning — and its themes of mortality, reinvention, and connection speak directly to a second-half-of-life reader.

Heyman is a New York psychiatrist who published this collection of her stories when she was 74. Not surprisingly given her profession, Heyman is a student of the human spirit, and her stories are most notable for the depth of the characters she develops. Her people are sexual even in the face of illness and with the specter of death in the wings. If you have ever had the good fortune to live in New York City, these characters will come to you like people you almost met. This story collection was well received (for example, Terry Gross interviewed the writer on NPR), and has helped to bring erotic writing by older women into public consciousness.

Book 3 of Lynne Spreen’s Sedona Silver Romances. When her youngest leaves for college and her workaholic husband comes home smelling of someone else’s perfume, empty-nester Heather Winstead walks out and lands among friends in Sedona. Reliving her freedom, she and her husband each have to decide whether the marriage is worth a second chance.

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.

The third collection from the Kensington Ladies’ Erotica Society — a group of women who have met in Berkeley for over twenty-five years to share the fantasies polite company won’t. Older now, and if anything bolder, they treat death as a mere distraction next to the twin appetites of mind and body. By turns racy and reflective, outrageous and open-hearted, these stories insist that desire doesn’t retire.

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.

As a young art student, Noel made a split-second choice that reshaped her life. Thirty years later, a museum secondment brings her back to London — and the people she once loved — forcing a reckoning with buried truths.

When a possible Caravaggio and its curator vanish from a San Francisco museum, cynical lawyer Zara and her scam-prone sister Lilly — two seasoned, sharp-tongued sleuths — give chase from California to a barn in Alsace, a wartime journal in hand.

In the old Scottish tale, a selkie sheds her sealskin to dance on the shore and a man steals it to keep her on land — but her heart stays with the sea. The three McFarland sisters carry the same ache, a pull toward the wild selves they buried. Frances chose the life of the intellect and is on the brink of tenure at an Ivy League university; Lala moves restlessly from lover to lover, chasing a creative life always just out of reach; Eddie pulls pints for fishermen on Roansay, the small island their late mother called home. Reunited in the childhood house at Hogmanay, each has to decide whether to stay captive to the life she built, or reclaim the skin she once shed.

Why it’s here: Sibylline Press — women authors over 50 — and a novel squarely about the reckoning that comes when grown sisters return to their mother’s house and count what they gave up. The selkie’s stolen skin is as good an image as any for a self set aside for decades.

Broke and lonely, a widow returns to claim her childhood homestead near Sedona and is forced into an uneasy partnership with a land developer. An enemies-to-lovers, second-chance later-in-life romance and Book 1 of the Sedona Silver Romances.

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 brilliant Harvard psychology professor and linguistics expert is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s at 50, and we follow her world narrowing from inside her own mind. Written by neuroscientist Lisa Genova, the novel is both clinically grounded and deeply moving — a rare window into cognitive decline told from the person living it.

Laid off from her tech job, Marianne returns to her dicey Kansas City neighborhood to find that, as a middle-aged woman, age works against her — and a mugging pushes her toward starting over. Irreverent and human.

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.

During the Great Depression, young dancers Mattie and Kip tap for coins and ride the rails until betrayal and disaster separate them for a lifetime. Now ninety-nine, Mattie finally tells her granddaughter the whole story.

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.

Twenty-five years ago, five young heroes destroyed the bone wizard Eklor — and lost almost everything. Now middle-aged, grief-worn, and scattered, they reunite when signs suggest he has returned. Kreya, a widow consumed by one forbidden resurrection, leads them back into a fight they thought was finished.

A standalone epic fantasy that hands the quest to people long past their supposed prime, and takes their second chance seriously.