Lisa Congdon - A Glorious Freedom: Older Women Leading Extraordinary Lives (Gifts for Grandmothers, Books for Middle Age, Inspiring Gifts for Older Women)

To all the late bloomers.

Copyright 2017 by Lisa Congdon.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Congdon, Lisa.
Title: A glorious freedom : older women leading extraordinary lives / by Lisa Congdon.
Description: San Francisco : Chronicle Books, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016039249
ISBN 9781452156200 (hc)
ISBN 9781452156217 (epub, mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: WomenBiography. | Self-realization in women. | AgingPsychological aspects.
Classification: LCC HQ1123 .G59 2017 | DDC 305.4dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039249

Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, California 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com

by

Age has given me what I was looking for my entire lifeit has given me me. It has provided time and experience and failures and triumphs and time-tested friends who have helped me step into the shape that was waiting for me. I fit into me now. I have an organic life, finally, not necessarily the one people imagined for me, or tried to get me to have. I have the life I longed for. I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I would be.

Anne Lamott

The book you are holding in your hands is a book about women. It is a book about women over the age of 40 who are thriving.

You might ask, Why make this book? Why are the lives of older women worth celebrating?

My own lifes path is what piqued my interest in the topic. I am a self-described late bloomer. The year this book is published, I will be 49 years old. By profession, I am an artist, an illustrator, and a writer. I did not begin drawing or painting until I was 31 years old. I did not begin my illustration career until I was 40. I did not begin writing regularly until I was 42. I did not publish my first book until I was 44.

I did not get married until I was 45. I just published my seventh book. My eighth comes out next year.

Every year that passes, I become braver, stronger, and freer. Getting older has, for me, been an enormously gratifying and liberating process. I am a kinder person to others than I have ever been, and I also care far less than I ever have about what other people think of me. I am both more determined and harder working than I was when I was younger, but I also value experiencing joy in my life over my work ethic more than I ever have. I am both more secure and more vulnerable. Out of years of living with intense insecurity and trepidation, the wisdom of age has taught me the importance of courage and that my own unique path is just thatmy own unique path. Aging, as Anne Lamott so eloquently put it, has led me to myself.

In an effort to express my feelings on the topic, I wrote a short essay on getting older in 2014 and published it on my blog. That essay was quickly shared by thousands on the Internet, both through my blog and through social media channels. Although I have a decent social media following and a devoted audience of blog readers, I am not a celebrity or a full-time blogger, so the attention this essay garnered was rather phenomenal. I realized that if the topic of getting older and thriving was resonating so strongly with so many women, then I needed to explore it further.

And that is, of course, where the germ of this book sprouted. I had long admired some well-known late-blooming women and seen them as role models since I was in my 30s. I already had ideas of the women I wanted to include in this book. But I also used the power of social media to gather even more names and contacts. I began the process of making this book by reaching out to my Internet community (my social media followers and blog readers) with one basic request: help me find the women you know or admire who exemplify bold and adventurous agingartists, writers, athletes, scientists, activists, thinkers, designers, and feminists over 40 who are embracing the positive aspects of getting older: the wisdom, emotional resilience, work ethic and play ethic, insight, and sense of humor that come with age. I asked my followers to help me identify women who were late bloomers, women who hit the apex of their careers later in life or who made some bold move to live in interesting ways after the age of 40.

The response was astounding. I received emails from scores of men and women around the world with all flavor of submissions: long lists of women I should profile or interview, along with essay submissions from women about the process of aging, their relationship to aging, the struggles, the triumphs. The response to my call was, in fact, so astounding that I was literally overwhelmed with how to contain the potential for the book. Id contracted with my publisher, Chronicle Books, to make a book that was 155 pages, and I was absolutely sure Id have enough material to make a book five times that length!

I set out to cull together the best of everything I receivedto research and write about women I admire, to contact real-life female heroines for interviews, and to sift through the endless essay submissions for the book to fit it into the format you are holding in your hands.

Historically and across cultural divides, women have been told to remain silent, to sit still, to hold back, not to shine. In addition, women have traditionally regarded their ability to please othersover following their own dreams and desiresas one of their greatest strengths. Furthermore, for countless generations, women have been told that once they hit middle age, their opportunity for greatness has passed.

And so the resilience and courage demonstrated by women, and, in particular, the ever-growing population of older women, to challenge and redefine these notions is one of the most exciting things to observe in the world today. We live in a time when more and more women are beginning to live out loud, to follow their own desires and dreams, to be who they are, to live fully, to live a second life after their children leave home, or their partners are no longer with them, or their previous careers are no longer meaningful.

This book profiles many women who paved the way for uswomen like Katherine Johnson, Louise Bourgeois, Julia Child, and others who were challenging notions of what it meant to be an over-the-hill woman long before today. Many of these women discovered hidden passions and talents much later in life or hit the most exciting and fruitful time of their careers as older women. They are, undeniably, role models for reimagining what our lives can be. The book also tells the stories of extraordinary women today who are reinventing what it means to be an older womanwomen who are breaking through barriers, successfully completing athletic feats, and doing their best work in their 60s, 70s, and 80s.

When I first put out a call for suggestions for the book, I got a handful of emails and Internet comments from older women for whom aging was actually