FLASH COUNT DIARY
A NEW STORY ABOUT THE MENOPAUSE
Cathy Rentzenbrink in the Times characterised this book as ‘a mix of memoir, literary criticism and social and natural history’, in which Steinke’s intention was to ‘fight back’ against the ‘comedic’ way the menopause is usually treated. Rachel Cooke in the Guardian said it started life as ‘a scribbled record of [her] internal weather fronts, the flames of which lash her 10 times a day’. Jennifer Szalai in the New York
Times thought she ‘evocatively described the feeling of flames that start from her internal organs and radiate toward her skin – an excruciating sensation that can be detonated by a tiny uptick in the thermostat or the gentle warmth emanating from a plate of freshly scrambled eggs’.
Rentzenbrink described how Steinke looked ‘to the animal world for succour’, finding it in particular in the case of the female killer whale which has a long and fulfilled postreproduction life. ‘This is a fiercely intelligent trawl through menopausal waters that is not afraid to confront the intricacies of the female body and mind, and there is a beautiful precision to the writing,’ she said.
Cooke took particular issue with Steinke’s decision to ‘butch things out’ rather than take HRT, regarding it as ‘an instrument of the patriarchy’. This Cooke thought was a ‘depressingly retrograde argument, and a pretty stupid one, too’. Despite her reservations, she found herself ‘oddly compelled by this weird, infuriating, uncategorisable book’, if only because she ‘enjoyed arguing with it’. Szalai found the writing ‘uneven’; either ‘lugubrious and condescending’ or infuriatingly jaunty. Nevertheless the book left her ‘wanting more: more voices, more works about this transformation’. The subject, she wrote, felt ‘truly fresh and transgressive, while nubility is beginning to seem like, well, old hat’.