Books

Gail Collins surveys three centuries of American history to show that older women have always been more influential, more inventive, and more powerful than the culture acknowledges. From colonial grandmothers to suffragists to modern activists, No Stopping Us Now recovers a hidden history of elder women who refused to step aside.

A childless woman in her late fifties tells the unvarnished truth of caring for her older husband as Alzheimer’s dismantles the retirement they’d planned on the Oregon coast.

Wealthy, newly widowed Claire is adrift; Erica, a burnt-out young outreach worker, is about to be fired. Their collision becomes a partnership to get ten unhoused women off the streets and into a community of their own — until one woman’s past threatens it all.

Why it’s here: Newly widowed Claire finds late-life purpose and reinvention through the women she sets out to help.

I have been a fan of Sharon Olds‘ poetry ever since she spoke out about incest in her collection, The Dead and the Living (1983). Her work is incredibly incisive, beautifully crafted, and utterly unblinking, even as she examines subjects we are discouraged from mentioning, much less capturing in poetry.

The personal nature of Olds‘ poetry, her focus on her children, her marriage, and her own sexuality, has made her controversial throughout her career. Yet she has persevered, and later in her career won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer for Stag’s Leap, her 2012 volume about the end of her long marriage.

In her 2016 book “Odes,” the poet explores sexuality from her vantage point as a woman in her sixties. Poems like “Blow Job Ode,” and “Ode to the Clitoris,” continue her saga of making the personal poetic.

These poems make it clear that being a certain age is no reason to stop examining (and enjoying) sexuality.

As her 50th birthday approached, Jo Blackwell felt old, unfit, irrelevant and quietly terrified — so she started writing. The blog that became this book struck a chord with thousands of women asking the same question: what the heck just happened to my life? Collected here, the posts are wry, raw and reassuring by turns — ageing bodies, hormones, confidence, grief — landing on the simple conclusion that life is about family, friends, community and being useful, and that she was OK just as she was.

The honest, funny end of the midlife shelf.

Lucy Barton and her first husband William, now in their sixties and long divorced, take an unexpected trip together to find the half-sister William never knew he had — a secret daughter of his late mother, living in Maine. Elizabeth Strout’s luminous novel is about the persistence of love in its strangest forms, and about what we keep discovering about ourselves and each other as we age.

Southern women artists and writers — painters, sculptors, novelists, poets — reflect on creativity, aging, and what it means to keep making things as the years accumulate. Edited by Jay Lamar and Jennifer Horne, this anthology is a testament to the creative life as a lifelong practice, not something that fades at a certain age.

Mary Caine, nearly sixty, still hopes each year that the mother who abandoned her will return with the Midsummer Carnival. Instead it is Sadie Barnes, the first love who left town thirty years ago, who may be coming back. A later-in-life lesbian romance.

Journalist Margaret Webb sets out to run a marathon at 50 and discovers a world of women athletes defying aging. Packed with science and inspiring stories proving fitness peaks are not behind us.

Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel gave us Olive Kitteridge, the prickly, difficult, deeply alive retired schoolteacher of Crosby, Maine — a woman who cannot help offending people and cannot stop caring about them. In thirteen linked stories spanning decades, Olive becomes one of American fiction’s most unforgettable older women.

Olive Kitteridge is older now, and a little softer — though not much. In a second cycle of linked stories set in coastal Maine, Elizabeth Strout returns to her most beloved character and finds new reserves of tenderness and humor in a woman who has lived long enough to know what she has been wrong about.

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.

Piercy at eighty-four, writing poems about cats, cooking, marriage, the dead, and her own approaching end with no softening whatsoever. The late work of a poet who has been documenting women lives since the 1960s.

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.

Interviews and portraits of women at fifty, on work, bodies, marriages and what they intend to do with the second half. The first in the series that continues with On Women Turning 70.

Sixty-something Celeste Waterbury escapes to the desert to leave a failing marriage behind, then finds herself unsettled by her attraction to the rugged Sedona contractor she hires. Book 2 of the Sedona Silver Romances.

When a parent’s attack sends traumatized teacher Chelsea Garden fleeing home to the California foothills, her life tangles with a beleaguered principal and an old flame. Following three educators at different stages, it’s a novel about the calling of teaching and the courage to change course.

Why it’s here: One of its three educators is a veteran principal in the last chapter of her career, weighing reinvention in her later working years — an older woman’s story threaded through an ensemble.

The collection that made her name, in its third edition with a foreword by Emma Watson. The famous undercover Playboy Bunny exposé is here alongside the essays that argued for a world run “as if women mattered.” Half a million copies since 1983, and the foundation everything later in her work stands on.

Sheehy maps caregiving as a passage with predictable stages, drawn from her own seventeen years of it. Practical about the logistics and unusually direct about the resentment, exhaustion and identity loss that the role carries.

In Edinburgh’s COVID-lockdown spring of 2020, cold-case detective DCI Karen Pirie learns of an unfinished manuscript by a recently dead crime novelist — one whose plot reads like a blueprint for the real, unsolved disappearance of a university student. As Karen digs, she uncovers a spiralling game of betrayal and revenge where lies are indistinguishable from truth. The Queen of Crime delivers one of her most fiendishly clever Karen Pirie cases yet.

Why it’s here: A genre thriller rather than a book about aging, but its lead is a seasoned, midlife woman investigator — competence and command held by an older woman at the center of the story.

Peg sells beachfront homes, raises two kids, and holds her life together with duct tape and dark humor. What she can’t manage is menopause, divorce, and an ex who flirts with women half her age. As hot flashes and brain fog upend her world, Peg unravels in hilarious, inconvenient ways, and begins to suspect her breakdown might also be a breakthrough.

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.