About This Book

Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood is a handbook for the 37 million women who are becoming what used to be called "of a certain age."

They don't fit into the only traditional model left - "Grandma" - for women who have fulfilled all the roles already assigned them - daughter, wife, mother, loyal employee, volunteer, all around self-sacrificing nurturer.

They drive themselves crazy with the question: "What am I going to do with the rest of my life?" but they feel a surge of power and joy when they try out the answers. They are at the frontier of an often frightening new life experience that is both a personal journey and a stage of maturity that they are defining as they live it.

The book helps readers find the answers to the three big questions each woman is wrestling with: What matters? What works? What’s next?

Levine’s invention of Second Adulthood is the first full exploration of what is going on here. Drawing on personal stories, cutting-edge science, up-to-date trend analysis, woman-tested wisdom, and her own sometimes painful, sometimes very funny struggles with life after her fiftieth birthday, she shows that Second Adulthood women are not the same women they have been, only older; they are really different.

Women at midlife really do start to see the world differently, which the latest brain research is proving to be literally true. Starting with what she calls "the fuck you fifties," and moving through the "fertile void" of self-doubt and on to "letting go and saying no," Levine charts the progress of women like herself to assertiveness, empowerment, and fulfillment in this unprecedented life stage.

"You and I," she writes, "are the first generation of women to have been nurtured on a recognition of women’s independence -- thanks to the Women’s Movement of the ‘70s and ‘80s; that gives us the chutzpah to go for a Second Adulthood. We are the first generation to be recipients of new levels of health and longevity expectations; that gives us time. We are the largest segment of the largest population demographic in U.S. history, and that gives us consumer and political clout. And science is producing breakthrough research showing brain changes that suggest our outlook is literally being redesigned from inside; that gives us affirmation. What we don’t have yet are role models or road maps for the journey, and that can make freedom feel like chaos and promise feel like wishful thinking."

Inventing the Rest of Our Lives offers the models and the road map. It is fun, smart, informative, and also a wake-up call.