The Ripe Stuff

Jane Fonda, Judy Collins, and Isabel Allende are in their juicy years. So are a Midwest banker and Boston professor, a therapist who became a Mexican inn-keeper, an empty nester who took up Contra dancing.

Author Susan Swartz likes to call this model of the new fifty-plus woman a Juicy Tomato, someone who enjoys her lushness, and, to push the metaphor, squeezes the most from life. The generation of women who fought to have a career, guilt-free sex, and their say in all things now insists on the right to make the second half of life as meaningful and ground-breaking as the first.

Juicy tomatoes know that experience is an asset, not a liability and that wisdom and power are a lot sexier than a flat stomach. They don’t apologize for their age and they don’t hide their spunk and savvy. Sure, there are regrets, losses, and laugh lines, but juicy tomatoes don’t look back. Long after breaking barriers for women in their youth they are remaking the image of midlife and beyond.

The Juicy Tomatoes Guide to Ripe Living After 50 introduces you to over 100 such women, some well known and some as regular as the friends you call for coffee and comfort. They have clout and daring and humor and the reason they stand tall is not simply because they take their calcium. In candid interviews with the author they tell how they forged ahead and kissed those aging stereotypes goodbye.

The Juicy Tomatoes Guide to Ripe Living After 50 will inspire you, tickle you, and may even spur you to find your own juice.

In reading Susan Swartz’s wonderful The Juicy Tomatoes Guide to Ripe Living After 50 , I laughed out loud, recognizing so many of my own internalized myths about the aging process. What a relief to realize that there are so many gutsy and brave women over fifty who have turned life’s detours and challenges into grand opportunities through their amazing resourcefulness and creativity. These passionate and daring risk takers are a joyful testimony to the new possibilities of womanhood. The lives of so-called ‘ordinary women’ are woven into the most extraordinary tapestry of good advice and celebration of joyful living. Resonating throughout every story is the profoundness of Eleanor Roosevelt’s message, ‘You must do the thing you think you cannot do.’
- Molly Murphy MacGregor, executive director and the cofounder of the National Women’s History Project

After reading this second book by Susan, I’ve realized that not only am I juicy AND ripe, I’ve been marinating long enough! No more excuses! I’m gonna get out there and LIVE! I would be happy to call any one of the women in this book, ‘Sister.’ Susan knows how to bring the ‘juice’ out of each of us!
- Dee Adams, creator of Minnie Pauz

The Juicy Tomatoes Guide to Ripe Living After 50 gives you a girl’s night out without leaving your favorite reading chair-or bubble bath. It’s a ‘whew!’ for those of us at 50+ who have thoughts 180 degrees different from our mothers, letting us know we aren’t alone. And a nudge down a path we were contemplating but needed just a bit more courage to take the first step.
- Jeanie Linders, writer and producer of Menopause: The Musical, founder of Aging Out Loud, and publisher of W4W VOICES