I’m an avid reader, always have been, but books (and friends and art) have been one of the main things gave me comfort and sanctuary through the tough midlife years.
Here are a handful of the ones that have impacted me the most (and the art that resonates most with each). Let me know if you would like more reading recommendations in the comments below – and add a favourite book of your own to the comments.
1. Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life, by Sharon Blackie
In Hagitude, Sharon Blackie turns the tables on what it means to get older. Her book is built on the question: What would it mean to stop trying to hold onto the woman you used to be and instead realised this period in our lives is an initiation into becoming the wiser woman?
This is a book about reclaiming the power and possibility of growing older as a woman, rather than treating midlife as the beginning of decline.
Blackie takes the figure of the hag, the older, wise, often feared woman of myth and folklore, and asks what she can teach modern women about the second half of life. She draws on Celtic and European myths, psychology, personal experience and the natural world to explore what happens when women move beyond the identities that have defined their earlier lives.
The Queen, fine art print. Who we move into being after the Maiden and the Mother.
A central idea is that midlife can involve a kind of stripping away. Roles change. Children may need us differently. Bodies change. Parents age or die. Careers and relationships can shift. The things that once gave us identity may no longer fit. Rather than seeing that as a crisis to be fixed, Blackie presents it as an initiation into a different kind of womanhood.
The hag represents a woman who is increasingly unwilling to contort herself to remain pleasing, youthful, useful or acceptable. Her value comes less from how she is perceived and more from what she knows, what she has lived through and what she is prepared to stand for.
There is also a strong connection to nature and the idea of ageing as seasonal. Blackie challenges the cultural obsession with perpetual youth and suggests that later life has its own purpose: wisdom, creativity, truth-telling, mentorship, freedom and a deeper sense of belonging to ourselves and the world around us.
For me, this is one of the key resources (more to come in the future) that turned the conversation around the midlife tumult, menopause and HRT around. Sharon is a storyteller at heart, which makes this book so accessible.
2. Goddess in Everywoman: Powerful Archetypes In Women's Lives, Jean Shinoda Bolen
This is a book about understanding the different parts of ourselves as women, and recognising which ones have been running our lives.
Jean, a Jungian psychiatrist, uses seven Greek goddesses as archetypes representing different patterns within women: Athena, Artemis, Hestia, Hera, Demeter, Persephone and Aphrodite. Each embodies a different way of relating to work, creativity, relationships, motherhood, sexuality, independence and power.
The fascinating part is recognising yourself in them. You might have spent decades in Demeter, the mother and nurturer, putting everyone else's needs before your own. Or Athena, the competent, ambitious woman, has driven your career (yes, me!). Maybe you've suppressed Aphrodite, the sensual, creative part of yourself, because there hasn't been room for her. Until now maybe.
And that's where I think the book becomes particularly relevant at midlife.
Aphrodite, part of the mini-print series
Jean's point isn't that you're one goddess. Different archetypes become dominant at different stages of our lives, and we can consciously develop aspects of ourselves that have been neglected.
Midlife often disrupts the roles that have previously defined us. Children grow up. Relationships change. Careers that once mattered can lose their pull as our values change. Our bodies change. We start questioning choices we made decades earlier.
Through the archetypes, Jean gives us a language for asking: Which parts of me have I lived fully? Which have I abandoned? And which woman in me wants her turn now?
Midlife is a time of reckoning and this is where we decide which parts of ourselves to bring more online and honour, and which of our shadows to lay to rest.
3. The Heroine’s Journey, Woman's Quest for Wholeness, Maureen Murdock
This a book about a woman's journey back to herself after spending years trying to succeed according to values that may never really have been hers.
Maureen developed the Heroine's Journey partly in response to Joseph Campbell's famous Hero's Journey. She felt that the traditional model of leaving home, conquering challenges and returning victorious didn't adequately describe the psychological journey many women experience.
The journey she describes begins with a woman separating from the feminine and identifying with the masculine world of achievement, productivity, independence and success. She learns how to perform, prove herself and get things done. And often, she becomes very good at it.
But eventually there can be a reckoning.
The things she worked so hard to achieve don't necessarily give her what she thought they would. There may be exhaustion, grief, emptiness or simply the uncomfortable realisation: I've built the life I was supposed to want, so why doesn't it feel like mine anymore?
That's when the journey turns inward.
Bold, framed canvas print. A midlife word for me inspired by this book
Rather than another mountain to climb, Marion describes a descent: grieving what's been lost, reconnecting with the feminine, healing our relationship with ourselves and eventually bringing the masculine and feminine parts of ourselves back together.
This is why it can land so powerfully at midlife. It's not really about throwing away everything you've built. It's about recognising that achievement alone isn't enough anymore and asking what a life built from wholeness, meaning and your own values might look like.
I discovered this book in the inexplicable midst of wanting to reconnect with the feminine during menopause, without knowing how to name this deep yearning I felt. This book made sense of the discomfort I felt in my own skin, the done-with-all-that I felt about performing and the shifting values I felt at this time.
There's a workbook you can buy separately as you read through the book too. One of those books that makes you say ‘Ohhhh…I get it!’
4. The Names, Florence Knapp
On a lighter note, when all a woman wants is a bit of escapism in a hammock, this book was a heart-rending, beautiful book.
Without ruining the story, it’s a novel built around one pivotal choice - what a mother decides to name her baby, and how that choice might alter the course of an entire life.
The story begins in 1987 with Cora, who has recently given birth to a son. Her husband expects the baby to be given a traditional family name, continuing a pattern that carries much more than simple tradition with it. Instead, Cora considers three different names.
From there, the novel splits into three parallel versions of the family's future, following what happens depending on which name she chooses.
But the name itself isn't really the point. The book is about choice, identity, family patterns, motherhood and the tiny moments when a woman either follows the life that has been laid out for her or begins to choose something different. It also deals with domestic abuse and the ways its effects ripple through a family, so it's considerably darker than the premise might initially suggest.
For a midlife woman, I think its power lies in hindsight. By this stage of life, most of us can look backwards and identify seemingly small decisions that sent our lives down completely different roads. We can also see the things we've inherited from our families and decide what we want to carry forward and what needs to end with us.
It’s like Sliding Doors, but for books and made me have a little moment considering all the paths not taken in my own life.
5. There Are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak
This is a novel about memory, loss, belonging and the invisible threads that connect human lives across centuries. As I've grown older, my ancestors are more present in my mind than ever before, one of the reasons I loved this book so much.
At its heart is a single drop of water. Elif follows it through different times and places, weaving together the stories of people whose lives are connected by two ancient rivers, the Tigris and the Thames.
We meet Arthur, born into poverty beside the Thames in Victorian London, whose extraordinary memory and fascination with the ancient city of Nineveh change the direction of his life. Then Narin, a Yazidi girl living beside the Tigris in 2014, travelling with her grandmother towards her ancestral homeland as both her culture and the world around her are threatened. And Zaleekhah, a hydrologist living on a houseboat on the Thames in modern-day London, whose marriage has ended and who finds herself questioning the life she has built.
Water moves through all of their stories; falling as rain, flowing through rivers, becoming part of human bodies and returning again. It becomes a beautiful metaphor for the things we inherit and carry: memory, trauma, stories, culture and love.
Where Heaven Meets Earth, framed canvas print. Rivers in this sky.
For a midlife woman, I think Zaleekhah's story in particular resonates. She has reached a point where the structure of her old life has fallen away and she has to confront what remains when the identities and certainties she relied upon no longer hold.
But the bigger message is perhaps even more relevant to midlife: nothing exists entirely on its own. We are part of stories that began long before us, and what we do becomes part of stories that will continue after us.
Let me know in the comments if you've read any of these and if so how they landed for you. And please do share your favourite midlife book or writer, I'd love to read more!
Nic x