Breaking Free: Women of Spirit at Midlife and Beyond

A groundbreaking anthology for women searching for spiritual guideposts to the second half of life

Breaking Free is a collection of personal essays by women in the second half of their lives—essays in which they examine what age and life have taught them, reflect upon their lives and experiences, and reveal where they have arrived. As editor Marilyn Sewell notes in her introduction, around the age of fifty or so, many women begin to separate from cultural constraints, to become their own persons in ways they perhaps had not dared to do previously. "They begin to become defined less by others and more by their own choices. This movement into personhood does involve some breaking of barriers, and there is a kind of release, a kind of freedom, in the breaking and in the choosing."

This sense of moving into personhood in the shadow of mortality animates Breaking Free, giving its essays a wonderful forthrightness and boldness: These are writers who get down and dirty, who have looked at themselves as they are and life as it is. They are facing what time has taken from them, but also, more importantly, discovering the powerful gifts that come only with age and experience.

Contributors include Vivian Gornick, Audre Lorde, Erica Jong, Grace Paley, Terry Tempest Williams, Isabel Allende, Barbara Hurd, Sandy Boucher, and Maya Angelou.