Jane Juska, whose search for sex as a retired woman in her 60s became a bestselling memoir and later a play – instead of leaving her “murdered or made sad at the very least”, as she expected – has died in California. She was 84.

Her son, Andy Juska, told the San Francisco Chronicle his mother died on 24 October at a care facility in Chico, after an illness.

Juska was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1933 and raised in small-town Ohio. Educated at the University of Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley, she raised her son alone after a divorce in 1970. She taught English in high school, college and San Quentin state prison.

She was retired and volunteering at Planned Parenthood when she wrote her 2003 book, A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance. The title came from an archaic term for a promiscuous woman.

The book grew out of a personal ad Juska placed in the New York Review of Books in 1999. Inspired by an Eric Rohmer film, Autumn Tale, it read: “Before I turn 67 – next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.”

Speaking to the New York Times in 2003, she said that before she sent the ad she thought to herself: “What harm might this decision cause other people? The only person that would be is my son. So I asked him, and he said: ‘Go get ’em, Mom. It’s your turn.’ The night I sent the ad in I felt so great.”

The ad prompted 63 replies. She spent a year following them up before writing the book, she said, because she “didn’t want to think, ‘What if I never had sex with a man again?’”

The flings with men of all ages changed her life, she said.

“I had no hope of it turning out to be anything like this,” she told the Times. “I expected to be murdered, or made sad at the very least. But I never expected to have intimate friendships with extraordinary men.

“True, I’ve met some men who are not kind or thoughtful, but I’ve also met men who are kind and thoughtful and funny and true. Which is to say, I guess I found out that men are people.”

Sharon Gless as Jane Juska, on stage at the Aldwych Theatre in London in 2011. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Her book was originally written as fiction. Turned into a humorous memoir on the advice of one of the men she met through her ad, it was a hit and landed her on television with Oprah Winfrey and Charlie Rose.

Juska also wrote a follow-up memoir, Unaccompanied Women, which dealt with the loneliness that preceded her placing of the ad. Discussing A Round-Heeled Woman with the New York Times, she said that in retirement she “was busy, but there’s nobody touching you. People don’t pay attention to that part.”

In 2015, Juska published a novel, Mrs Bennet Has Her Say, which gave a sympathetic hearing to the maligned mother in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. She also wrote essays and reviews for titles including Vogue, Self and the San Francisco Chronicle.

A Round-Heeled Woman was adapted into a stage show featuring the Cagney & Lacey star Sharon Gless. It played in San Francisco and Miami and, in 2011, in London. On Twitter this week, Gless wrote: “She was funny and brave. I loved her very much.”