Women of a certain new age

More and more women see menopause as the starting point of their new lives, and many are writing about it.

Kathy Rinaldi gets ready to head into the surf at Seaside Park in New Jersey Picture: Caitlin Ochs/The Wall Street Journal

Darcey Steinke knew she was going to write a book about menopause when she read that two of the only creatures to go through it were human women and killer whales. Instead of disappearing into the murky depths, she learned, the whales became leaders of their pods.

“I shouldn’t be depressed this is happening,” the 57-year-old author recalls telling herself about her new stage of life as she began writing Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life, out next month.

“There are so many boring ideas that are not helpful. Let’s talk about how powerful the transition is.”

As a new wave of women steps into their mid-centuries and beyond, they’re looking to chart a course for the second part of their lives that looks different from the one their mothers knew. The next few months will bring a spate of books by women who look at midlife as a time to start over, take risks and view themselves in the world as anything but invisible.

“I definitely think the cultural dialogue has opened up,” says Lauren Wein, executive editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “A lot of people really need a template for this time period.”

It’s a striking moment of exposure for women over 50, who increasingly are taking commanding roles.

Michelle Obama on her speaking tour at State Farm Arena in Atlanta tmonth. Picture: AP

Melinda Gates, 54, hit bestseller lists this northern spring with her debut book, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World. Michelle Obama, at 55, has been filling arenas for six months on her speaking tour for her blockbuster memoir, Becoming.

CBS News anchor Gayle King, 64, and president Susan Zirinsky, 67, are flexing their muscles in morning television in the US, and Lockheed Martin chief executive Maril­lyn A. Hewson, at 65, is a regular on magazine “most powerful” lists.

“It just seems like a new, zeitgeisty time when women are saying, ‘We’re not going to do our 50s the way everyone’s telling us we’re supposed to’,” says Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell, 60, who returns in August with the autobiographical novel Is There Still Sex in the City? (Answer: yes.)

Some of these books arrive thanks to new demand from ­female readers seeking frank accounts by contemporaries grappling with midlife, says long-time editor Sarah Crichton, who recently left a career at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

“All the anger coming from women over the last couple of years is the result of too many secrets, too many unshared experiences and not enough collective effort to push women forward,” she says, adding that the books combat some of the lasting stigmas around women and ageing.

In her debut memoir out next month, The Beautiful No: And Other Tales of Trial, Transcendence, and Transformation, former Oprah Winfrey Network co-president Sheri Salata describes ageing out of the 25 to 54 bracket, which the TV industry has long called the “sweet spot” for advertisers. “All around us, the message is the same: You’re done,” writes Salata. At first, it seems almost rude to ask for more.

But the 59-year-old one-time workaholic doesn’t feel done, and instead decides to devote all her energy to following a “happiness compass” that guides her midlife reinvention.

“In this day and age, if you start taking care of yourself, it’s not unreasonable to think that the 50s might truly be halfway up the mountain,” she writes. “This may be the middle of your life, not the beginning of the long goodbye.”

Salata benefited from a female gatekeeper at HarperCollins who saw the potential in her message: Karen Rinaldi, Salata’s editor and founder of the imprint Harper Wave. “This woman — she is me,” says Salata. “We instantly recognised each other as soulmates.”

This month, Rinaldi released her own midlife manifesto, built on her decision to learn surfing in her 40s. (It’s Great to) Suck at Something: The Unexpected Joy of Wiping Out and What It Can Teach Us About Patience, Resilience, and the Stuff That Really Matters uses her ocean challenges to show how joy and growth come from risking failure and letting go of perfectionism.

The 57-year-old publishing executive at HarperCollins, which like The Australian is owned by News Corp, says she could not have written this book even a decade ago — it took those extra years to feel comfortable admitting to her weaknesses and seeing what she could learn from them. “In the tenacity that I had to find to keep surfing, despite how hard it was and how bad I was at it, I forgave myself,” she says. “I realised, ‘Oh, this applies to basically everything that I do and we all do.’ ”

It's Great to Suck at Something, by Karen Rinaldi.

Rinaldi and some others writing from the trenches of middle age are aiming for a general audience. In her new work, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed, Los Angeles therapist Lori Gottlieb explores not just her own struggles after a breakup in her mid-40s but the issues of her male and female patients. The book is a bestseller.

One of the best-known modern bibles on ageing, Passages by Gail Sheehy, is itself middle-aged at 43 years old. In the decades since it came out, women have written other bestsellers on life’s later ­stages, from Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman in 2006 to Roz Chast’s 2014 graphic memoir about caring for her elderly parents, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

As for Steinke, who argues in her book on menopause that a mix of ageism and misogyny has isolated older women, the natural world continues to offer inspiration. Several years ago, while sea kayaking off Washington state, Steinke saw what a guide told her was the oldest known killer whale on earth, an orca named Granny, believed by some experts to be 105 when she died in 2016. Steinke still thinks about this matriarch and others like her.

“These whales lead their pods,” she says. “Nobody offers them hormone therapy. They just lead.”

The Wall Street Journal