Review Excerpt:

Some anthologies suffer from too much of the same thing. But in For Keeps: Women Tell the Truth About Their Bodies, Growing Older, and Acceptance (Seal Press), editor Victoria Zackheim has brought together writers from a range of ages and cultural experiences on the subject of living in a female body. Novelist Elizabeth Rosner becomes an artist’s model in an attempt to make peace with her body, to try and see it simply as “contours and dimensions, a graceful and anonymous arc in space.” Writer Carrie Kabak decides that cutting off ties with her criticizing mother—who is familiar with “every eyelash, every mold and freckle”—is the only way to make her body her own. Other essays deals with injury, illness, and other major failings of the physical being. Some women become athletes, pushing their bodies beyond what they thought capable, while some watch their bodies crumble and degenerate from a lifetime of pushing. This surprising collection is full of moving takes on aging gracefully in a female body.