Suzanne Braun Levine
Open Road Integrated Media
You Gotta Have Girlfriends – A Post-Fifty Posse is Good For Your Health is the fourth installment of my on-going exploration of women’s lives after fifty – the stage known as Second Adulthood – and my first ebook. The book will be available on April 16th from my digital publisher Open Road Integrated Media, a company co-founded and run by my friend Jane Friedman, the CEO.
The special nature of our friendships with women – Our Circle of Trust – is one of the main themes in all my books, blogs, lectures, and interviews and it is at the core of the on-going story of my generation as we grow, change, age, and discover our authentic selves.
Our generation called the special connection between women “sisterhood” as we led the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement, as we reported on and defined the societal inequalities and issues of women’s lives in the pages of Ms. magazine. And, as we now connect across generations with other women and around the world (TEDxWomen, One Billion Rising, etc.).
This new stage that millions women are defining as we live it and I brought into the mainstream with my first book Inventing the Rest of Our Lives would not be nearly as filled with laughter, health and happiness without our women friends. This book celebrates all of it!
We are the first generation of women that has the opportunity during the period from 50 – 75+ to explore a second chance at growing up; like adolescence, this transition is tumultuous and confusing – I defined it as the “Fertile Void” – but we emerge stronger, bolder (what I dubbed “The Fuck-You Fifties” in Fifty Is the New Fifty). We are better equipped to take on the joys of an Encore Career, grandparenting, intimate/love/sex relationships which I explored in How We Love Now: Women Talk About Intimacy After 50, as well as the challenges of aging including the stresses being of the sandwich generation, which can be eased by learning the important new skill of being a care-getter as well as a care-giver.
You Gotta Have Girlfriends is the first book to tie all of women’s interpersonal connections together for our generation – and the next – with interviews, research, individual women’s stories, anecdotes and studies that break new ground and re-affirm what women in tribal villages, quilting bees, book clubs and the frontlines of feminism know – we live better, longer, healthier and happier when we are linked with other women in a circle of trust.
Join me here and around the Web on my favorite blogs as we celebrate ourselves, our girlfriends of all ages and our “Post-Fifty Posses.”