Your Turn: How to Create a Midlife You Love

From award-winning health and science correspondent for NPR News and contributor to CBS Sunday Morning comes an illuminating road map to reclaim your physical and emotional health in midlife.

Not long ago, celebrated journalist Allison Aubrey was having breakfast with her youngest child, who suddenly turned to her and said: "Stop looking at me." In that moment, as her daughter signaled a need for independence, Aubrey felt a sting, like she'd been fired. She reminded herself: teenager, individuation. It's her job to separate. But...ouch!

That moment was a microcosm of what felt like a crisis of both identity and purpose. Many women come upon such feelings of bewilderment at midlife: Beyond being a mother, beyond work, who am I? After years of striving, how do we expand our focus beyond parenting and a paycheck? What else is out there, now that the badges of achievement have started to feel less important?

While reporting her How to Thrive as You Age series, Aubrey talked to many people who had looked forward to the empty nest years and were eager to leave behind stressful jobs, but once they got there there was no playbook to thrive. Some faltered, lacking purpose and connection. If so many smart people struggle to make this transition, who is thriving? To find answers, she took a sabbatical and set out on a curiosity tour in search of people getting it right. Were they out there? She feared she'd be disappointed.

What she discovered "changed my life," Aubrey says. The result is her first book, Your Turn: How to Create a Midlife You Love, which answers the question What's next? with an electrifying message and a winning and deeply practical road map to reimagine your life.

Aubrey presents a captivating collection of women, ages 45 to 105, who cultivated creativity, connection, and joy, showing how it's possible to find meaning and momentum in midlife. She takes what she's learned, from scores of fascinating women she met both on this journey and in her decades of reporting as a journalist, to give readers a playbook for what could be next. She weaves together incredibly powerful insights and resources of rediscovery to help you reignite your passions and hit your stride in midlife and beyond.

She cuts through the clutter of health and self-improvement advice and offers readers indispensable, evidence-backed strategies to thrive. A kind of What Color Is Your Parachute? for middle age, this book provides us surprisingly simple yet specific steps we can take now to make the most of our third turns.

Aubrey combines the rigor her audiences have come to expect with the attunement, inquisitiveness, and sense of service that have made so many of her health stories go viral. This book is the new blueprint for your midlife reawakening, with an empowering, essential message for women: The best time of your life starts now.