100 books like Flirting With Fire

Another Gen-X special, this delightful book has a Shop Around the Corner/You’ve Got Mail plot that plays out in an online role-playing adventure game.

Her nom-de-game is Bogwitch. His is Otter. Before they realize they’ve met in person, she thinks he’s a teen, he thinks she’s an octogenarian. In reality, they’re only 2 years apart in age (48/50). Under her prickles hides a deep well of compassion and under his caretaking is an enormous need to be able to maintain boundaries.

They complement each other so well and the book rips along at a cracking pace. 

This book is a celebration of many things: embracing your visible markers of age, seeking a new kind of relationship with an adult child, and the fabulous music of the 80’s and 90’s.

Any person from Generation X will absolutely see pieces of themselves and their friends in the characters in this book. Originally college friends, our couple finds themselves both back in New York and via a series of missteps and then some forced proximity (not only do they have to work together, they have to work for his daughter), they fall gloriously in love.

Even though this book has an element of girl-meets-guy-in-Paris, I included it under the title of ‘books set in France that go beyond the rom com’ because it was so refreshing to read about a woman of a ‘certain age’ who comes into her own during a stay in Paris. The protagonist struggles with real-life issues, not the usual Emily-in-Paris dilemmas. Cram knows Paris like the back of her hand and deftly titillates all the senses with her food-inspired passages.

Annie, Brenda, and Elise have been wronged. Not only have their husbands taken them for granted, but they have gone so far as to deceive, betray, and hurt them. Now these friends, sisters in humiliation, want justice.

I understand. I felt similarly when I was soldiering through my divorce. What reasonable thing could I do to get back at him without hurting anyone else, especially my kids. I never found a specific answer, but therapy and this book helped.

I enjoyed the way the girls were there for one another and wished I had friends in my boat who would get me like that and support me like that. Betrayal is rough, especially when you’ve given love with your whole heart. This book is a cathartic ride through the weeds.

Flavor Pick: Neapolitan

Despite the title, I think that any gender can draw something from this book. It is the sequel to her phenomenally successful book “How to be a woman”, which quite frankly changed my life and made me decide to have children. This new book can be read as a stand-alone and charts Caitlin’s thoughts on her late 30s and 40s. It begins with her usual hilarious and irreverent tone, speaking about the pressures put on you by children, parents, work, best friends, basically everything. It suddenly becomes very serious in a way I didn’t expect though, and the message of balance is one that is important for anyone to read in this way. I rarely say this and mean it but… it made me laugh and it made me cry.

Cynthia, a forty-something English professor in the throes of perimenopause, develops unusual abilities and slowly learns to channel them, with help from a visiting faculty member from Faerie. I was lucky enough to read this book in an early draft, and then in its final version. What I love about this novel is how it treats magic as yet another weird thing that happens to you as you get older. I also relished watching Cynthia figure out her new powers in the context of ordinary life: navigating faculty politics, being a mom, working on her marriage. A smart, wry twist on the School for Magic trope.

Notaro is a comedic goddess. I still don’t know what a “tweaker” is (since reading Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death years ago), but she cracks me up hard, early, and often. I wish she was my neighbor. She somehow makes her other characters sound as funny as she, which they may or may not be in real life.

The chapter on becoming magically invisible once you let your hair go grey is worth the price of admission. This book is largely about aging. She mines the comedy. I hope to meet her one day.

A contemporary romance written with lush prose and a transportive southern setting, this untraditional love story sticks in my mind. 

A wife and mother is stunned to learn that her first love is the father of her son’s new girlfriend. Their secret, unresolved past unravels as she assesses her present life and the choices she’s made. The temptation of the one that got away lurks in her mind as she navigates a precarious balance between family, obligation, and desire.  

I just love this book. Again, it’s set against such an evocative landscape – this time in Western Australia. It tells the story of a tentative love affair between a reckless poacher and the wife of a wealthy landowner – and the inevitable fall-out. There’s even a soundtrack to go with it – Winton’s a musician too.

The writing’s so pitch-perfect that I had to keep stopping to scribble phrases down. It’s that good. Why is it about survival? As well as Luther Fox, the poacher, struggling to get over the tragedy of his past, the last third of the book focuses on his walkabout up north to Coronation Island, where he deliberately shipwrecks himself. Cue the wilderness: scavenging, hunting, sheltering. True, haunting, survival in its rawest sense as he battles to redemption.

I love this memoir because Robin Rinaldi fiercely loves and trusts herself for being sexual, and shows us from the inside what it means to positively claim our sexuality in midlife.

Rinaldi undertook a brave and vulnerable journey—a year-long break from her companionable but passionless marriage to find passion by pursuing a variety of sexual traditions and relationships with men. Her story is not only an entertaining page-turner, but deeply vulnerable and satisfying. 

She chronicles her heart as well as her body, and reminds us that it is not always easy to take risks—there are challenges, heartaches, and rewards in creating a deeply satisfying life. Further modeling bravery, she also wrote an Atlantic article about transcending the slut shaming she received from writing the book.