Fifty and Fabulous! The Best Years of a Woman’s Life
Fifty and Fabulous! The Best Years of a Woman’s Life
Author: Jaki Scarcello
Reviewed by: Anne Holmes for the NABBW
Author Jaki Scarcello is on a mission to challenge and enhance our perspective on growing older. This book began as a series of interviews with women ages 45 to 102 in five countries. Their wisdom provides its foundation.
As Scarcello tells the reader at the front of the book: “A few years ago I began to interview interesting women who were nearing or passing the age of 50. I started the project for a variety of reasons, in response to circumstances in my professional life as a corporate and executive coach and in response to questions that arose in my personal life. By the time I stopped asking questions, I had interviewed women between the ages of 45 and 102, from five countries. At the end of the interviews I knew I needed to write these women’s stories…”
Why? Because she had realized that women facing their fiftieth birthdays and/or Menopause, fell into two categories:
- Those who were horrified by the concept of aging, and looked to their future as a time of decline and diminishing capacity – something to be denied as long as possible
- Those who weren’t fazed by the milestones but were celebrating the new possibilities brought to them by each stage of their lives
She dubbed the second group the Women of the Harvest – women who have embraced the idea that being over 50 and female at this time in history is an opportunity richer and more ripe with potential than ever before.
If you’ve ever wondered what your role in life is to be once you’ve passed your reproductive years, this book is for you. After all, with human life expectancy advancing as it has, most of us have the opportunity to live as many years after menopause as we do before.
Read this book and you’ll discover that Women of the Harvest — women who blossom in their 50s — know that their time of life is a time of grace, and that it’s richer and more ripe with possibility now than at any other time in our history. Once you understand this, you can this embrace the years after 50 with a spirit of optimism and energy that is truly liberating.
You’ll begin to understand that in maturity a woman has the potential for genuine elegance, a beauty more than skin-deep that sparkles confidently and generously from the eyes, and a whole new brand of personal sexiness. Not to mention that, on a deeper level, you’ll possess a secret power and joy, which radiates outward into the world and illuminates everyone around you.
The harvest of a good life divests itself of youth’s superficial anxieties. In the space that opens up beyond 50, experience and potential form a perfect fusion: this is the most fertile ground a woman ever knows.
You’ll find this to be an inspirational book and one you’ll want to share with your friends.
