The upside of feeling fat, flushed and facing 50

My heart is broken, my world is dead, my home destroyed. I’m staring into the void.’ Sandra tsing Loh, 49 years old, is in a state of near-despair: anxious, newly-divorced, putting on weight and stumbling through the ruins of a love affair she’d hoped would be her salvation.

She is sobbing uncontrollably in her car about the death of her children’s hamster. She is sad, disappointed and confused. She is also, she soon discovers, in the early stages of the menopause.

Loh’s midlife malaise manifests itself with bloating, weight gain and uncontrollable moods, until a diagnosis of menopause galvanises her into finding ways to navigate ‘the change’.

her voyage of self- discovery is at the heart of this frank and funny memoir: she is encouraged that women such as Madonna and Oprah have helped remove the stigma associated with middle-age, and demonstrated that it can be a time of female empowerment. In non-european cultures, menopause is often regarded positively: in India, for example, it is seen as a time of growth, opening the door to enlightenment and wisdom.

On this side of the world, meanwhile, the menopause is seen as profoundly unglamorous: three parts desiccation, one part fury, when a woman’s face becomes a tangle of wrinkles and lost gravity. Loh laments ‘the appearance of morning chin hairs that, by noon, are long enough to braid and twirl up into thick Princess Leia buns’.

her solution? Self-help books, wacky, new exercise regimes, a personal trainer, fanatical dieting (‘I have counted the carbs in ketchup’) and a haircut.

She and her lover manage to patch things up, at first ecstatically reunited, later irritating each other to the point where he temporarily moves out.

the ups and downs of their relationship provide a metaphor for what is happening inside Loh’s head and body.

after one of her two daughters — 11-yearold hannah — is teased on Facebook, for example, Loh prepares to exact ruthless revenge on the schoolboy culprit, stationing herself outside his classroom, ready to do violence.

In the book’s most moving section, Loh charts her devastating feelings as she loses her enthusiasm for being a mother. In a terrible admission, she writes that she feels