100 books like Unmasked

I love this memoir because Leslie Morgan is a wise, funny, articulate, sex-positive, feminist BFF, who shares her emotional and sexual journey in the year after divorce and before turning 50 with pride rather than shame as she renounces the drab ex-wife role, dresses alluringly, and dates wildly.

Writing about sex and dating can be a cliché-ridden minefield, but Morgan enlivens the highs, lows, and middles with metaphors that resonate and invite you into the scene. And it’s not just about sex – it’s about the emotional truths that she learns along the way as she demonstrates an enjoyable way for older women to reclaim their sexual mojo and feel valued as an older woman. 

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.  

Delightful sexuality in a senior community! What better place to celebrate the different ways that women over 60 can enjoy a happy sex life—with themselves, men, women, or supernatural beings—than in a retirement community during the Pandemic lockdown? 

Stella Fosse skillfully and delightfully weaves stories of confident older women isolated in their cottages, alone or with partners, who know or discover what they want sexually, and find ways to pleasure themselves or others. Although residents are only allowed to wave at each other during their daily masked and distanced walk around the grounds, the more adventurous ones find ways to connect.

The stories all come together and culminate in a joyful post-pandemic unmasking at a romantic ball. Very sweet and positive!  

I recommend this hot and sexy collection of erotic fiction and memoir because for me it doubles as a source of arousal and a mesmerizing glimpse of the range of sexual activities that seniors (mostly hetero, some lesbians, some gay men) imagine and carry out.

From the slow sex of long-term lovers, to hand jobs offered despite arthritic hands or carpel tunnel, to the variety of ways married couples orchestrate hot love-making, to the pleasure of “in-the-meantime” lovers, these stories sizzle and burn. They expand our view of what is sexually possible as we age, and provide an inspiring and stimulating bedside reference for singles and couples of all ages.

To be savored one story at a time, not gulped down as a whole. 

This book from the early 1990s continues to speak volumes about society today. In completely accessible writing, it helped me to see how major historical developments (the spread of democracy and belief in human equality) occur in tandem with people’s daily lives (marriages that pursue the ideal of “democracy in intimacy”).

Couples who pursue “pure relationships” founded on sexual and emotional equality are doing something revolutionary—in a revolution that has been gathering momentum for over two centuries. Each of Anthony Giddens’s chapters illuminates different aspects of this large story, and each gave me insights into what it means to be a man or a woman seeking love and happiness in a changing world.

I first learned about Logan Ury listening to the podcast This is Dating. While I was waiting on the second season to drop, I learned about Dr. Ury’s book.

I’m not trying to be ageist, but it was refreshing to hear dating advice from a professional that isn’t older and hasn’t been married for decades. Ury’s dating years being more recent meant she gets the landscape modern daters are struggling to find love in. Her perspective was instantly more relevant to me.

There were also several knowledge gems that she dropped throughout her book that I’d already learned the hard way, which gave me more confidence in giving the new-to-me information she presented a shot.

This is an excellent book about relationships and attachment theory, which describes our attachment styles in relationships. I loved reading this book because it taught me about my own attachment style and how I am in relationships.

This is a must-read for anyone who wants to learn about themselves in relationships. I enjoyed the concepts in the book and how relatable it was. I recommend this to every human being who would like a relationship. It is a great way to learn about yourself.

Long familiar to me, John O’Donohue’s books became a particular solace when grief arrived. I would recommend any of his books.

O’Donohue lived on the western coast of Ireland, and he had a distinctive wisdom about threshold spaces—those places between the life we have known and the one we cannot yet see—and a compassionate way of inviting us to receive the grace that comes as we stumble our way across those thresholds.

Eternal Echoes is one of my favorites among O’Donohue’s books. I am especially taken by his chapter about absence, where he acknowledges the deep ache of loss while also emphasizing that our losses are not utterly empty; they hold a hidden eternity that does not abandon us. I am both consoled and challenged by his assurance that grief is a mystery that knows its way.

If you're looking for a book that captures the zeitgeist of contemporary relationships, here it is, well before the reign of Facebook. Calling upon social commentary, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, feminist theory, anthropology, family theory, and linguistics, the author presents a broad-based, scholarly, and sobering analysis of the toxic trends and processes in our society which are casting Americans adrift from their emotional and psychic moorings, and leaving them unable to initiate or sustain meaningful relationships.

Because of the ever-growing impersonal nature of our society, it has become more difficult to begin and sustain intimate relationships. Indeed, it seems as if modern life is represented by a series of relationships of convenience that often lack substance. These kinds of insights make this book very appealing. The author contends that we're losing our overall ability to be involved in meaningful relationships and instead are relegated to something less. Most important, the author… show more.

It is not easy to write a self-help book without sounding pompous or unrealistic. This is why The Dance of Intimacy became a model for my own self-help books.

Lerner’s writing is straightforward, personal, and practical. She is, as am I, an unabashed feminist who understands that strengthening and/or healing relationships require the participation of both partners. First published in 2009 I have recommended this wise book to hundreds of clients.