Joy, Sorrow, Bliss: Dr. Mary Pipher’s New Equation for Aging Well

Twenty-five years ago, Dr. Mary Pipher noticed that American culture had been poisoning the lives of adolescent girls.  So the clinical therapist wrote the ground-breaking, #1 New York Times bestseller, Reviving Ophelia, a call-to-arms, told in the voices of the girls themselves, that jump started a change.

Today, at 71-years-old, Pipher isn’t finished with transforming our culture’s outlook on women, and she’s penned a new rallying cry—this time for older women—called Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing as We Age.

“I always write about what I want to understand,” says Pipher, who still lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.  “I always dig into a book to understand a complicated problem. In Reviving Ophelia, what I was seeing with teenage girls in my office in no way matched the cultural theories of what they were like, and that discrepancy was what I wanted to explore.”