Sixty is the new forty, we're constantly told. Or is it that seventy is the new fifty?
Yet fashionable clothes shops cater for little but elfin twenty-year-olds; magazines carry little but articles about appearing younger. Heaven forbid you try to apply for a job...
Older women are permitted to be either part of the slippers and cardigans brigade, or to cling desperately to their youth and insist on being 'young at heart'. Can't there be a third way? A way to age with grace, security, beauty and adventure, and a way to keep your identity against a growing tide of voices telling you how you'd be happier if only you looked ten years younger.
Covering topics from family, finances and work to cosmetics, fashion and sex, The Invisible Woman - which is also Helen's Guardian column nom de plume - is a new sort of book about ageing; one that teaches us not how to avoid it, but how to enjoy it, grow with it, and thrive.
