"I wouldn't even go back to as young as I was yesterday. Being this age is completely freeing. To walk out of the house without wondering who's looking back at you makes it possible to focus on what you really want to focus on. It makes it possible to get your work done. For a long time, all I thought about was, Who's looking at me? Who's interested? I didn't even really look at what I felt like looking at on the street. That's what I called sexual power. About 10 years ago, exactly what I'd feared came to be: My 'sexual power' changed. For so long, how I looked represented everything to me: who I was as a woman, my power, how I could engage. When it was over, I discovered so many other things. I began to write. I started to see that I wasn't at the world's disposal—I call the shots, and what I'm interested in is what I'm interested in. One day in my 50s, I just woke up and realized I really didn't care about any of the rest of it and hadn't for quite a while. The heat was gone, and what replaced it was an avid desire for life."

— Abigail Thomas, 63, fiction and autobiographical writer and author of Safekeeping