Menopause Lit

Is it just me or is menopause hot right now?

A photo of an erupting volcano by Jacob Lawler on Unsplash

Hello!

Last week I published an essay about my former OBGYN, a man with ties to the anti-choice movement named Dr. Mikeal Love. (In its first iteration, my title for this essay was “Goodbye Dr. Love,” but because the internet hates mystery it was published as “After My Abortion, My Next OBGYN Called Women ‘Host Organisms.’”)

Today is the 100th day of my menstrual cycle—a data point I only know because Dr. Love encouraged me to start tracking my cycle years ago. I’m almost to the finish line! All of which is to say, I’ve got gynecology on the brain.

I remember the first time I read a novel with a scene in a gynecologist’s office: it was Still Life by A.S. Byatt, the second novel of the series concerning Frederica Potter and her sister (also known as the “Frederica quartet”). This was in the late ‘90s, when I was around 20 years old, and I was stunned; the mere fact that I was reading about a character in a novel sitting in the waiting room of an OBGYN’s office floored me. I had read Henry Miller’s raunchy prose and Anais Nin’s erotica. I had read plenty of sex scenes, mostly in mediocre novels by men. But aside from Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, I hadn’t read anything that dealt seriously with, or even acknowledged the existence of, a female character’s internal plumbing. At the time I worshipped A.S. Byatt, so her imprimatur meant a lot to me. I thought, “Wow, I guess it’s okay to write about this!”

AYTGIMM (as I refer to it in my journal) was published in 1970. The feminine hygiene equipment that Margaret used was already well out of date by the time my generation started menstruating. And yet, some readers are still hoping the 86-year-old Judy Blume will write a sequel in which Margaret goes through menopause. There is a meme going around. Apparently, people on Redditt have been talking about this. Which just goes to show: it is high time for menopause lit.

I’m thinking, of course, of Miranda July’s latest novel, All Fours. In case you haven’t heard, All Fours is the story of an unnamed female protagonist, a 45-year-old wife and mother, who, like July, is a moderately famous creative person who dabbles successfully in a number of artistic fields. (The reader would not be surprised to learn that our unnamed heroine, like her creator, inspired a piece in The Onion similar to this one: “Miranda July Called Before Congress to Explain Exactly What Her Whole Thing Is.”)

Like so many of us (tempted to quote the title of a Miranda July movie here), the heroine of All Fours struggles to manage her multifaceted roles as mother, wife, and artist. She feels most like herself when she is working in her garage studio or sharing junk food with her best friend, a sculptor. At home, she massages kale for her child’s lunch and fantasizes that someday she might reveal her whole self to her husband. She knows that the image of a unified self that she projects to her family is a “dangerous lie.” The truth is that she’s a kaleidoscope, “each glittering piece of glass changing” as she turns. “At five o'clock I have to consciously dial myself down before reentering the house, like astronaut Buzz Aldrin preparing to unload the dishwasher immediately after returning from the moon,” she says. 

When she receives $20,000 for the rights to a sentence that she wrote about a hand job that was optioned by a high-end liquor company—evidently, a real thing that happened to July—our heroine decides to drive to New York for a fun vacation with some friends. About half an hour outside of L.A., however, she meets a cute young guy, an aspiring hip-hop dancer, who works at a Hertz rental car office. Instead of driving to New York, she gets a hotel room, pays the dancer’s wife $20,000 to redecorate the room, and embarks on a passionate if mostly chaste affair.

NB: I just looked up “chaste” in the dictionary, and only one of its definitions fits my meaning in the previous sentence, i.e., “deliberately abstaining from sexual intercourse.”  There is a lot of sex in All Fours, and very few of the sex scenes depict old-fashioned intercourse. (Consider yourself warned: All Fours is not for the squeamish!)

After the hotel room love nest, a lot of things happen as our narrator copes with a traumatic childbirth experience in her past, learns about menopause, and attempts to reimagine the structure of marriage. I won’t give any more of the plot away—you wouldn’t believe me anyway. Without question, All Fours is the most surprising novel I’ve ever read. If another novel pushed me from arousal to disgust to tears on the same page, I’m sure I would remember.

I loved All Fours and have had many fascinating discussions about it with my friends. I mean, really, an unprecedented number of discussions. People who know me tell me what they’re reading all the time, but it’s never happened before on this scale: multiple people texting me to share their reactions to the same novel as they were reading it. Readers, especially women, especially women in middle age, are reading this book and having thoughts—an alarming development in some corners. Someone at the New York Times seems to think that All Fours is converting book clubs into covert cells of radical feminist operatives intent on upending traditional marriage. Putting aside the implication that women needed a novel to point out that marriage in our crumbling capitalist state is a trap, it’s clear that All Fours tapped into a zeitgeist.

Nonetheless, I avoided writing about All Fours when I read it last summer. I didn’t think I needed to. Its influence was already bleeding through; the world seemed oversaturated with what the Times called “the first great perimenopausal novel.”

And then my book club picked Catherine Newman’s Sandwich, a slim novel about a woman in her fifties vacationing for a week in a cabin on Cape Cod with her husband, daughter, son, son’s girlfriend, and parents. (I almost wrote “aging parents,” but they’re all aging. We’re all aging. Isn’t that kind of the point?) Sandwich (so titled because the narrator is “sandwiched” between generations, but literal sandwiches are also consumed) is also very much about the thing we used to refer to as “The Change” (another novel I’d like to read). Menopause lit began to feel less like a (hot) flash in the pan, more like a movement.

I really wanted to like Sandwich. I loved this introduction to the main character, Rocky: “She is halfway in age between her young adult children and her elderly parents. She is long married to a beautiful man who understands between twenty and sixty-five percent of everything she says. Her body is a wonderland. Or maybe her body is a satchel full of scars and secrets and menopause.” I love that the story begins with an overflowing toilet in the beach house. But Sandwich immediately got on my nerves, and though I was interested enough to keep reading, it kept provoking me. I wanted to argue with Rocky about something she’d said or done on almost every page, as if she were a beloved, hilarious-but-maddening old friend. This is because Newman doesn’t avoid the stereotype of middle-aged woman as hot, hormonal mess—in Rocky, she takes that stereotype and runs the length of a mall parking lot.

Right after Rocky’s husband, Nicky, unclogs the toilet, the couple realize that they left the bag with all the swimsuits at home:

“Are you kidding me?” I say. I’m still standing on the edge of the tub, balancing myself with a hand on the shower-curtain rod. “I specifically said, “Did you get all the bags out of the hallway?’ And you were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I got all the bags.’”

“Right,” he says. “I know. I guess I didn’t.” He doesn’t look at me when he says this. “It’s not, like, a massive crisis. We can get new swimsuits in town.”

“Okay,” I say. “But you totally minimized my concern about whether we had all the fucking bags.” Ugh, my voice! You can actually hear the estrogen plummeting inside my larynx.

“Jesus, Rocky.” He’s dragging a bath towel around the floor with his foot now. “It’s not a big deal.”

“I didn’t say it was a big deal,” I say quietly, but my veins are flooded with the lava that’s spewing out of my bad-mood volcano. If menopause were an actual substance, it would be spraying from my eyeballs, searing the word ugh across Nick’s cute face.

Rocky, in her fifties, has hot flashes, mood swings, insomnia, and a lack of personal boundaries. Like the protagonist of All Fours, she also has a traumatic birth-related experience in her past. My favorite passages in Sandwich were when Rocky talks about her 20-year-old daughter, Willa:

When we get to the beach, Willa runs to the water with her pail. I’m so in love with her that if we were marsupials, I’d be stuffing her grown self back into my pouch. You’re fine! I’d say to my leggy, complaining kangaroo or my cranky eucalyptus-scented koala. Get in there and be quiet. Instead I take her picture with my phone. She wades through the shallows, bending down to scoop up the hermit crabs that are scuttling away, darting along the bottom from seaweed clump to seaweed clump like spies in a spy movie. “Hello, little friend!” she says to every crab she meets. She holds them close to her face, talks to them gently.

I appreciated Rocky’s love bubbling up and out, flowing uncontrollably around her daughter. (She has a friendly affection towards her son, Jamie, but doesn’t seem to love him as volubly.) Mostly, though, I felt annoyed with Rocky and her regressive ideas about gender. When the family picks up a pamphlet on the Myers-Briggs personality test and learns, according to Rocky, “that the women in our family have feelings and the men have reason and math in the place where their feelings would be,” I thought, wow, next are you going to tell us that men are from Mars and women are from Venus? Spoiler: she does! (See page 193.)

Rocky and her family are funny and relatable, but even when I read lines that I have actually said (e.g., “I wouldn’t know so much about rap if I didn’t read The New Yorker”), I couldn’t fully embrace this book. I was distracted by the thought of how a reader might interpret it if they weren’t a middle-aged woman. Might they get the wrong idea about menopause? Might they conclude that a middle-aged woman whose hormones are changing shouldn’t drive a car, fly a plane, or run for office?

There is a scene involving a tampon in All Fours that I loved so much I told my 15-year-old son all about it. I have assigned the novel to my husband (with the necessary caveat that I’m not interested in an open marriage). Some of my All Fours-loving friends have done the same. I rarely ask my husband to read a book that I love, so when I do it’s for a special reason. In contrast, if I saw a man reading Sandwich, I would be tempted to snatch it out of his hands. (Except I wouldn’t, because I am capable of controlling my impulses.)

What if it’s not only hormones that make us burn with rage? I have long suspected that becoming a mother opened my eyes to all the way in which our daily lives are dictated by a set of policies and assumptions that are not designed, as I think they should be, in the best interests of children and families, but actually in direct opposition to those interests. I get this feeling sometimes—it’s a tickle at the back of my throat, an itch I can’t scratch. It comes over me when I see a photo in the news of old men deciding federal policy related to reproductive healthcare. It nags at me when I think about teacher salaries, public school calendars and bus schedules, or the lack of childcare options for restaurant employees. It flares up when I read that a vice presidential candidate thinks school shootings are an unfortunate “fact of life.” In the last few years, and especially during the COVID-19 lockdown, this maternal injustice spidey sense has been on overdrive. I call it my “emperor’s new clothes” feeling, because I feel like the child in that story: I want to scream that something we are all looking at is utterly wrong, and yet no one is saying anything.

Sometimes you have barely the nucleus of an idea, around which you’re just beginning to form cells, and then someone else’s fully articulated theory comes along through the ether and attaches itself to your cluster of idea-cells. Something like that happened to me last week. I was going about my business, thinking about how motherhood provides a special lens on the injustice of the world, when I learned, courtesy of Danielle LaSusa, about the work of feminist scholar Nancy Hartsock.

In her 1983 essay, “The Feminist Standpoint: Toward a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” Hartsock argued that society’s sexual division of labor produces in women a special point of view: “[W]omen’s lives make available a particular and privileged vantage point on male supremacy, a vantage point that can ground a powerful critique of the phallocratic institutions and ideology that constitute the capitalist form of patriarchy.”

I was interested to see that Hartsock turns to literature to prove her thesis, citing poet Adrienne Rich and a passage from Marilyn French’s 1977 novel The Women’s Room:

Washing the toilet used by three males, and the floor and walls around it, is, Mira thought, coming face to face with necessity. And that is why women were saner than men, did not come up with the mad, absurd schemes men developed: they were in touch with necessity, they had to wash the toilet bowl and floor.

As I’ve said, Sandwich begins with an overflowing toilet scene. There is also a really gross scatological section of All Fours. In both instances, unlike in The Women’s Room, the main characters and their husbands are in the shit together. I’d call that progress! And yet, the female protagonists of Sandwich and All Fours feel oppressed by their roles in the family in a way that their husbands—both basically good guys—do not experience.

In Sandwich and All Fours, a woman’s first-person point of view on the capitalist form of patriarchy is on full display. In both novels, a female character investigates a body that has seen so much change and wonders why other things have barely changed at all. Readers want to experience characters who are looking for a way out of the same, tired old ruts. Sandwich and All Fours offer two such narratives. I am glad that they exist, even if I did prefer one over the other.

“The entire world should probably be reorganized in a more feminist way,” said Miranda July in the New York Times, but “the micro, everyday version is like, what can we do right now?”

Other interesting things

• One reason it took me so long to write anything about All Fours is that Tracy Clarke Flory already said most of what I would have wanted to say. “There is so much packed into this thrilling, wholly original, and at times deliriously bizarre novel—from its treatment of perimenopause as a last call for sexual adventure to a scatological callback to Me and You and Everyone We Know. What stood out to me most, though, was its rendering of deep loneliness and a lack of intimacy within heteronormative marriage, motherhood, and domesticity.”

• If you’re not sure if you’re ready for All Fours, try reading “The Metal Bowl,” a short story published in the New Yorker in 2017 that feels like a prototype of the novel.

• Why don’t straight guys read novels? I found this article as disturbing as I find anything that quotes Andrew Tate. Not sure about the parting advice – mandatory Fourth Wing for all does not sound like the answer! Side question: when is a male celebrity going to start a book club?

• Over at one of my favorite Substacks, the Biblioracle Recommends, book critic John Warner asks, “Are novel covers alienating male readers?”

• Here’s an essay by a mom who paid her kid $100 to read a book and felt like it was money well spent. I can’t afford this kind of incentive, but I respect the motive to get children to read by any means necessary.

Bye for now!