Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood

Very good read! Helpful information & thought provoking examples for women who are 50+. I bought several copies to give away to my friends.

This book is at the top of my list as a must-read for all of my coaching clients trying to negotiate the slippery slope of mid-life transition. For the first time, we learn not only that we are different at mid-life and exactly HOW we are different. Inventing the Rest of Our Lives is both reassuring and instructional.

I bought this book as I was anticipating my 50th b-day=It definitely resonated on many different levels-the book truly reflected my optimism about the future and I found it genuinely inspiring...I gave the book as a gift to 20 similarly aged women friends and their responses were also very postitive!-provoked much great discussion!

If you charted your 20's, 30's and 40's with Gail Sheehy's "Passages" and found nothing to help you through the next part of your life except books on menopause and others telling you that gray hair and an expanding waistline are better than youth and beauty, you'll love this realistic, empathetic and, yes, inspiring book! Like the journalist she is, Levine has interviewed hundreds of women, and many scientists and other experts, to understand what really happens to us, psychologically as well as medically, as we navigate these years. She makes a good case for her thesis, which is that not only our bodies are changing - our brains, needs and priorities are, too. The "fertile void" is a brilliant and spot-on description of the chaos and confusion of second adulthood that plunges every woman who's defined herself up to now by her obligations to others or the demands of her career (and often both) into a sometimes painful reexamination of her life - what's in it that we treasure, what's missing that we need or want, what possibilities still exist for making a difference in the world as well as in our own lives, and where the energy will come from for for realizing them. My book club just started reading it, and we've been burning up the phone wires to discuss it even before our next meeting. A must-read for every woman who reaches a landmark birthday still wondering, "What am I going to be when I grow up?"

This is one of the most inspiring books I've read in a long time. For those of us in our 50s and 60s, there's more ahead than retirement and taking care of aging parents, aging men, and growing grandchildren. Levine gives us stories of regular women who have tackled brand new careers, learned skills they always wanted to learn but never had time for, renegotiated their marriages and renewed their love-lives. And she also gives us scientific research that shows women's brains have a growth spurt in the 50s that renews our strength and our intellectual curiosity. Keep this book by your bedside and read it every night and your morning will be brighter.