Out of Office: A Retirement Memoir of Stepping Back, Showing Up, and Sucking at New Things

What happens when the structure that defines your days disappears?

Days before her fifty-third birthday, Brooke E. Rye retired from her career as a software project manager and promptly created a new role for herself: Chief Architect of a Well-Lived Retirement.

Unwilling to drift quietly into a wound down version of life, but equally unable to identify a singular passion, Rye did what she knew best. She builds a year-long retirement plan, complete with quarterly reviews, progress tracking, experiments in creative pursuits, fitness...and dogs.

With a wry, self-aware sense of humor and unflinching honesty, Rye examines what happens when the charts fill up and the goals get checked off, and discovers that the most meaningful parts of life rarely fit into a spreadsheet.

Out of Office is an unflinchingly honest, thoughtful exploration of what comes after the career and the routines we once relied upon.

This is a memoir about early retirement and reinvention for women who don't want to fade quietly, and quietly reveals how meaning can be built, piece by piece, in the absence of old structures.

If you've enjoyed Wild, Eat Pray Love, and The Happiness Project, Out Of Office is your next read.