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.

Allison Aubrey reveals how women can discover their own reserves of power by parlaying their skills, talents, and experiences into a new turn, the third turn of life. Join Aubrey on her curiosity tour to find more meaning, more energy, and a renewed sense of adventure in your third turn.

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 moments of bewilderment at midlife: Beyond being a mother, beyond work, who am I? After years of striving, how do we broaden our horizons past parenting and a paycheck? What else is out there, now that the badges of achieve­ment have started to feel less important?

Aubrey had watched colleagues retire, leaving behind the frenetic pace and excitement of work life, only to flail from a lack of purpose and connection. If the smartest people she knew were struggling, who was thriving? Who was getting it right? To find the answers, she took a sabbatical and set out on a curiosity tour. She turned her searchlight toward people oozing with energy and adventure. Deep within, she feared she wouldn’t find them, or that she would be disappointed. Maybe the best years are behind us?

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 centered 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 tools of rediscovery to help you reignite your passions and hit your stride in midlife and beyond.

She curates all the best tools to help readers answer a key question: Who am I now? She walks us through strategies to excavate our passions and rediscover what lights us up. 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, curiosity, and sense of service that have made so many of her health stories go viral. This book is for everyone seeking meaning and momentum. It is the new blueprint for your midlife reawakening, with an empowering, essential message for women: the best time of your life starts now.