We went 1,000 years, or maybe 10,000, without anyone ever mentioning menopause, and then we started mentioning it all the time – which wasn’t ideal either. There was a little bit of overcorrection, a little bit of generalisation. There was the Davina McCall type of menopause, where your car keys were in the fridge while your awesome body transformed, ungovernably, into something even more awesome. Then there was the Jenny Eclair alternative-comedy menopause, where your rage could lift a wardrobe clean off the floor. There was the radical loss of confidence event; or – for my money, the most poetic – the locked-in syndrome, where you lose interest in the world at exactly the same time as it loses interest in you, an alignment as perfect and painful as the needle going directly into the nerve. But for a long time there didn’t seem to be much room for the “no big deal, didn’t really notice” menopause, which is now inauthentic and unfashionable.
The flaws in the new narrative are pretty obvious. First, it hands down a template of feelings, which you either meet, and are a proper woman, or you don’t meet and have to pipe down until it passes (65?). Second, it creates a template for the social response to menopausal women: yes, treat them with infinite compassion, because of their hormones; but don’t worry too much about what they’re actually saying, because of their hormones.
Into this picture, painted in neon, with all the regular colours airbrushed out, has stepped Miranda July, with All Fours, a novel which has been called “the first great perimenopause novel”. (Sidebar on the “perimenopause”: it’s very convenient; just using the word makes you sound like an instant expert. And it hugely elongates the number of years during which women don’t need to be taken seriously. A right-thinking, compassionate person could reasonably assume any woman was either peri- or full-on menopausal for 20 years, and therefore take anything she said with a pinch of salt. Whichever way you pinch it, that’s a lot of salt.)
Plainly, if you were in the “no big deal” camp, no part of you was waiting for the first great perimenopause novel, any more than you were waiting for the spectacle of chatshow hosts with sympathetic eyebrows to ask middle-aged women about their hot flushes, and yet, of course you’re going to read it, because it’s by Miranda July.
(Sidebar on July: I interviewed her for her last book, The First Bad Man, 10 years ago, at the Bristol literary festival, and just before we went on, she told me she was such a private person, she didn’t even have a photo of her child on her phone, just their toy. I thought: ‘Well, this will be dry,” and kicked off with a lowball question about her writing process. “When I started to write this book,” she began, “I just masturbated all day. I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t get anything done. It was just orgasm, orgasm, orgasm. In the end, a friend said I had to sublimate, like athletes do.” Anyway, not only for that reason, also because of that last book, I will never not read anything by July. If she wrote an Instagram post about her gut biome, I would read it.)
I don’t want to spoil All Fours, as you should also read it, but in a nutshell, the story of its protagonist’s perimenopause is a radical sexual awakening; radical not just in its intensity, but in the fact that she goes from objectified to objectifier – falls in love with a guy, for the first time in her life, purely for the contours of his body. Some other time we can discuss what it says about sex, the sexes and the human condition, but pause now to mark a new template: the Incredibly Fun Menopause. A new template, too, of social response to the Fun Menopause; society, if it’s paying attention, should be afraid, very afraid.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
