There is still a silence around the menopause... We need to get rid of that

Women share their stories of a part of life all too often ignored

IT used to be a club no one wanted to be part of. But a new generation of menopausal and perimenopausal women are changing that – and showing how the menopause is not just one story, but many. “We’ve got to get rid of this whole idea,” Kirsty Wark told me, “that you’re this dry old stick and that menopause is some kind of passage into a dark world of age and debilitation.

“I do think there is still a silence. There’s that quiet speaking, behind the hand, “She’s put on a bit of weight, not doing so well, menopausal . . .” We need to get rid of that.”

In recent years more and more highprofile women have been coming out of the menopausal closet and Wark, with her excellent 2017 BBC documentary, The Menopause And Me, was a trailblazer of that, as has been Lorraine Kelly. But there’s still a sense that the Big M is a conversation that occurs mostly below the radar. No one tells you it will be like this.

No one really prepares you for it. One of the reasons Kaye Adams and I published Still Hot! 42 Brilliantly Honest Menopause Stories, was because we felt that there were still not enough stories out there about this phase.

Most of the books on the topic the menopause memoirs of individuals or semimedical advice books. We felt the menopause, too often, was treated, in our culture, like one-size-fits-all tale of hot-flushes, when in fact the ways in which it is experienced is hugely diverse.

We were not alone in thinking the menopause needs more attention. It felt, this autumn, that we were part of an energetic wave of new voices talking about a phase in life that has so often been dismissed, ignored and shamed. New books like Meg Matthews’ The New Hot, Sam Baker’s The Shift and Amanda Thebe’s Menopocalypse.

But there was also backlash too – high profile voices say that women should stop talking about the menopause. For there is still some sense of shame, as I discovered in my interviews for the book, attached to this phase of life – and that shame rubs off on everyone.

Kaye herself even bravely confessed that she had long been a “menopause denier”. She observed, “I only realised in hindsight... that I was (and probably still am) a menopause denier. The word held such negative connotations for me: of a woman who was ‘past her best’, ‘over-ripe’, ‘surplus to requirements’, ‘irrelevant’.”

Pippa Marriott, a teacher, interviewed for Still Hot!, recalled that amongst leadership at her school there was a

shaming and embarrassment around the menopause which she was once part of. “There was a real element of not wanting to be associated with the menopause and the whole baggage of stuff attached.” In the end her struggles with brain fog, insomnia and anxiety contributed to her early retirement.

ONE of the reasons that we gathered together the 42 voices was because we recognised that the menopause is not just one story, but many. If we want to make lives better for those going through its many complex variations, we need to share more stories.

We need to take the revolution that has already been started by others and spread it wide. We need to make it a conversation that really feels like it is for all – whatever your symptoms, whatever your life experience, your ethnicity, your age, your fertility history, your sexuality, your gender identity.

Because the one-dimensional image we have in our culture is not enough. As psychotherapist Tania Glyde told us, many LGBTQ+ people find the public narrative around the menopause too “heteronormative and cisnormative” and “clichéd”. This, Bunny Cook, a trans and nonbinary actor, observed, can leave those who feel excluded from that narrative, excluded from help.

Many of the voices in Still Hot! are highprofile figures already on a mission to end the silence – Lorraine Kelly, Louise Minchin, Dr Louise Newson, Trinny Woodall, Sayeeda Warsi, Angie Greaves. Others are people with stories that clearly need telling, need broadcasting from the rooftops. I was left moved, tearful, angry, uplifted, in awe – by so many of the interviews.

These are people who shifted my sense of what the menopause is – and reminded me of the way it arrives in so many forms, with such variety of symptoms, knotted up with so many different versions of life experience.

From the start, I knew a book about the menopause would be not just about the menopause. It would speak of childbirth, not having children, gender identity, femininity, ageing and the thread that weaves back through our lives right to our first period, of shame and repression.

It’s about coming out the other end of that fertility journey, whatever we have done with what our unruly bodies have provided us with, and wondering whether you could have lived your life some other way – whether you have even properly engaged with it. In a society without shame around periods and sex might you have had a whole different journey?

One of the themes that kept cropping up was desire and desirability – whether one is “still hot” – and the title for this book was actually inspired by a joke seen circulating on the internet, the single line, “I’m still hot – it just comes in flushes.” There were many different thoughts on the question of hotness.

While some revelled in their continuing sexiness, others seemed glad to throw off the shackles of desirability, to break out of the cage of sexual objectification. As childlessness campaigner Jody Day put it,

“What about not being hot at sixty? What about being comfortable and dumpy? I’m planning to embrace my inner Miss Marple as I get older.”

In doing these interviews I came to appreciate that how we feel about the menopause varies almost as much as the symptoms. I was one of those who hadn’t seen it coming – and, when it arrived for me at 45, not long after the death of my brother wasn’t ready for it.

IFELT that something suddenly had been stolen from me. There was none of that relief at the end of periods – only a desire to have them back. It wasn’t so much that I wanted any more of my fertility – I felt blessed to have two lovely sons – but, like the loss of my brother, this was a death too early, too soon, too unexpected, too uncontemplated.

But that shock pales by comparison with those who were thrown it much earlier. I was tear-struck talking with those who took that blow in their thirties.

For singer Michelle Heaton, fire service official Sahira Ahmad Belcher and RAF officer Andrea Macfarlane, the journey was made still lonelier by the fact that they were embarking on it outside their peer group, and at an age when the assumption is that they might still be fertile, when they might have hoped of another child.

And even if menopause arrives, as if on schedule, between 45 and 55 years old it can still deliver a blow of grief, particularly

What about not being hot at 60? What about being comfortable and dumpy? I’m planning to embrace my inner Miss Marple

if it brings a brutal finality to unwanted childlessness.

One of the things that struck me was how the menopause doesn’t exist on its own. Our experience of it, and even our hormonal balance as we go through it, is affected by what goes on in our lives. As actor and voiceover artist Nimmy March put it, the menopause gets “woven through” our life events.

THE stories that hit me most are the ones that touched on some of the biggest taboos. We may all be up for talking about rage and brain fog, but are we really up for a frank discussion about sex postmenopause? It was almost a relief to hear sex expert Tracey Cox’s admission that even she, highly sexed as she once was, has felt her libido drop through the floor.

Jane Lewis, a former horse rider, told us how the pain of vaginal atrophy left her so low she felt suicidal. “The burning,” she said, “was like sitting on a bonfire and if you bent over you felt like you were going to split open.” Vaginal atrophy is believed to affect at least 70 percent, or perhaps more, of menopausal women.

But the story is not all gloom. As some women said to me, menopause can be a superpower. It can be the thing that tips us over from ticking along into being lifeseekers. We saw that again and again in these stories. Faced with anxiety, sleeplessness, lack of control, Louise Minchin takes up triathlon, Erica Clarkson starts running her Meno Ultras, Trinny Woodall reinvents herself as a makeup entrepreneur.

For almost everyone in Still Hot!, it seemed the menopause really was a transition from one self to another – a journey. The author Sharon Blackie observed, “Menopause is about going inside. It’s really about taking the time to go inside and figure out what on earth this is all for.”

The menopause can all too easily divide us, as so many experiences in women’s lives can. Are you a taking HRT or toughing it out to become a wise old crone?

Sharing stories can help break down divisions – it can help us see what we have in common in the often difficult passage of the menopause.

Most of the big feminist revolutions of recent times have involved such sharing. We have seen the impact of MeToo, the power of Know My Name, as well as the fight against period poverty and the lifting of period shame through story-sharing.

The menopause needs its own movement. It already has one, burgeoning and growing, almost a twin to the movement around period shame and period poverty.

Our hope is that our book of stories will make others join the conversation – even those not actually in menopause. For this hormonal upheaval is not something just experienced by women on their own, but by all those around them.

It is something that all of us who float in this human sea of clashing hormones are touched by in some way. Let’s not let it pass silently. Let’s roar the M-word from the rooftops. Let’s overshare.

Still Hot! Kaye Adams and Vicky Allan, Black & White, £14.99

Kirsty Wark and Kaye Adams. Adams says: ‘I only realised in hindsight... that I was a menopause denier. The word held such negative connotations for me of a woman who was ‘past her best’