I snuggled in for a winter afternoon read with The Lake Shore Limited, by Sue Miller – the kind of book where you’re 50 pages into it and look up to realize the room and your tea have gone cold. But maybe just another 10 pages.

I’d been looking for a book like this, one that includes a strong, realistic woman of my generation. Someone you recognize, not a stereotype. And a type not found as often as you might expect, given that middle aged and older women still buy the most books.

One of Miller’s main four characters is Leslie, a woman whose body has gotten a little heavier, hair turned silver and whose mouth she worries might be turning into her mother’s frown. She also has her longings, flaws and fantasies, along with a reasonably contented white middle class life and a long time marriage. She has strong political opinions – an ardent Hillary supporter – and a sense of humor, amused to be asking for two senior tickets at “No Country for Old Men.”

Her life has included disappointment and great personal loss but when we first meet her she is thinking about how important it is to live with a “sense of possibility.” Possibility continues to be a theme in the book and it’s a subject I’d love to explore more with a woman like Leslie, or, for that matter, with Sue Miller. The author, who has always written about her generation, is now in her 60s and seemingly knows well this complicated chapter of life. Her male characters in The Lake Shore Limited also have age-relevant regrets and desires.

I keep a lookout for the modern mature woman character just as I once did for the modern young working mother character and the modern middle aged journalist character.

I like reading books set in unfamiliar, exotic territory but when it’s my world I want my women recognizable.

Here are a few other books on my shelf whose women are older, believable and sometimes funny as hell.

Nuala O’Faolain’s travel writer who moves to the country in My Dream of You.
Mary Gordon’s struggling artist who in her 50s meets a Prince Charming who provides love and lunch in Spending.
Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge who was often unlikeable through a lot of her years but became less a grump and more sympathetic as she got into her 70s.
Linda Olsson’s Astrid and Veronika, women of two different cultures and generations who share meals and secrets and try on swimsuits together.

Contrast them with the older women M.F.K. Fisher writes about in the story The Weather Within in her collection Sister Age. She describes two sisters traveling on a boat going to Europe. She labels them elderly and refers to them as nice old ladies. And they are in their 60s. True, Fisher was writing from the standpoint of a much younger woman and it was decades ago but this is how she described them:

“They dressed in good black or navy blue clothes for dinner… and their hair was soft instead of in the tight waves of most elderly middle class American women. They were dainty, their nails lacquered with an almost colorless pink and their stockings very fine. All in all, they were as nearly invisible as one can be after 65 and still breathe and defecate and chew.”

Oh dear, if you have to be aging isn’t it better to be doing it now?
Now, tell me your books that do justice to women of a certain age and attitude.

There are so many good reasons not to go to Europe this year. The ashy cloud out of Iceland is still hovering and who knows when another volcano might decide to erupt and mess up a two week vacation? It could rain in Monet’s garden. The baguette bakers might go on strike.

Besides, how can we indulge ourselves when the world is so volatile and the economy so insecure? We’re getting close to that fixed income part of life. Will we be spending money that we will one day wish we had?

Think how sad the dog gets when we leave. Think of all the email that will pile up. What if the house sitter forgets to water the tomatoes? What about our promise to be frugal and buy local?

There could be a terrorist on our plane. There could be one on the airporter getting us to San Francisco. There could be an angry, anti-American zealot lurking at the Marais café where we lounge with our au lait and croissant. There could be bomb-makers at the adorable inn in the charming Loire village with all the great castles.

Well, we’re going anyhow, calling it our “pensioners to Paris package.” Even though maybe we should be biking through Utah while our legs still work. Or spending two weeks working on a kibbutz or teaching English to kids in Malaysia.

The last time my husband and I went to France was during the Bush years when the French were still smarting over that dumb crack about French fries and embarrassed U.S. travelers sported maple leaf flags pretending to be Canadian. But now the French seem to be smitten with Obama and liking us again. And the dollar is no longer defenseless against the euro.

It still takes almost a day to get from our house to France and I look forward to that dazzling moment after flying all night when you push up the window shade and the sun is coming up over what must be Ireland and then England and then there’s the English Channel and a swath of green farmland and brown and white cows and stone farmhouses with blue shutters.

I’m still in love with foreign travel. I know people whose long careers had them airborne so much that once they retire they’re thrilled to hang out at home. Not me. I get giddy just thinking about going to another part of the world. We’re traveling with another couple and we’ve been playing at going to France since winter. If you only have two weeks to actually be there, you want to stretch it out with a long countdown. We have French radio streaming from our laptops, Paris weather on the Google map. I’m reading memoirs of France by Gertrude Stein, MFK Fisher and Julia Child.

The world has shrunk since those Americans discovered France as a second home. Travel was more exotic and distancing then. Now we are a global village with a world economy. We share airspace, cyberspace and each other’s bad days. Each of us is only a ripple away from another part of the world’s failed economy, earthquake, oil spills, violence, corruption, wars and retaliatory attacks.

We may be separated by culture and language – my French, as they say, (heh, heh) est pathetique – but we know each other. The storybook farmers we will photograph in the Dordogne worry about holding onto to their fields just like California farmers. The chic people we will ogle on the Right Bank likely fret over cutbacks at work and how to keep their apartment.

To them we will bring our tourist dollars, affection and empathy.