A positive, energizing look at the possibilities of women’s lives over 50 and the dilemmas that need to be solved. This is a good overview of the territory, straightforward and written with humor and pizzazz. She sees through conventional cultural expectations and punctures them at every opportunity. Dowling is also the author of The Cinderalla Complex and The Frailty Myth.
(excerpt)
I came to understand, as I worked my way through my 50s decade, that for women today, midlife presents all the challenge and opportunity - and all the potential tumult - that we experienced at adolescence. Those wild, unknown possibilities we apprehended at sixteen, that unique mixture of fear and excitement, is here again. Much as we had to put childhood behind us then, we have to put early adulthood behind us now. Much as we took the leap and embraced the future then, so we have to take the leap now.
The way it felt to me, as I entered my 50s, was that I needed to put myself in a new place. It wasn't a question, this time of getting out of a marriage, or finding a new love, or going back to school. It was more a matter of redefining myself, of digging deep into my character to discover what was most real, most enduring -- and of constructing my life in a way that would give prominence to that deeper sense of self, that would let it shine.
But how? How to do that? Nothing I'd been through in the past seemed to address this need to be in touch with my deepest self. There was no program, no specific course that in and of itself would take me to the untried parts of myself that were now yearning to be expressed. If I wanted to get to this new place I would have to open up, reach out, trust. ...
There are eight important issues that require attention from us at this stage. I decided to call them Choice Points. There are moments in time when we take actions, or don't take them, and the decisions we make at these moments profoundly change the way our lives spin out.
One: What's Age Got to Do with It? There are social barriers to women's aging happily and productively -- namely the double whammy of sexism and ageism that hits women at midlife.
Two: Caught in the Middle: We are bookended by the needs of both the younger generation in the older.
Three: “This Is What 50 Looks Like”: Parents, Livelihood, and Sexual Self-Confidence.
Four: New Intimacies: How we choose to be in our intimate relationships.
Five: Hormone Wars: Acquiring health information and developing our own ways of using it.
Six: Love in the Afternoon: Sex and the Menopausal Woman
Seven: Money of One's Own: Psychological and social barriers to financial independence.
Eight: New Choices: Moving off from the Frontiers of 50: Taking the risks to move into a productive, satisfying midlife."
Meaning & Purpose 
Coming Into Our Own at Fifty