Cracking the Menopause: While Keeping Yourself Together

Product Information

Optimistic, hilarious and informative. A rallying cry for women to love and look after themselves at any age. -- Susannah Constantine One of my biggest bugbear with menopause books – especially celebrity menopause books – is that they feel they have to be “worthy” and teach a “lesson”. I don’t want that. I want a book that will explain menopause and have a bit of life and fun about it. You know, like 50Sense… Frostrup and her fellow crusaders, who are “real women, campaigners, politicians, menopause experts, celebrities and journalists”, are aiming to increase pressure on the UK government to improve access to hormone replacement therapy and promote greater understanding of the impact of menopause. A groundbreaking, no-holds-barred guide to the menopause - that combines a passion to enlighten and inform as well as entertain - from inimitable broadcaster, writer and campaigner Mariella Frostrup and award-winning health journalist Alice Smellie. If you want to discover all the answers to your most burning menopause questions (no pun intended), then keep listening...

Overall I would say the beginning of this book is a helpful exploration of menopause but for details of the full range of symptoms and an inclusive way of managing them, I would suggest you look elsewhere, although our search for that may be continuing.

Summary

It’s high time we renovated and elevated this life change. Despite the centuries of speculation and propaganda, we are not overheating or inherently cold, we are not hysterics or boiling vats of toxic poisons, we are not dried up or washed up, we are simply menopausal.

maybe because of this it reads like an anxiety inducing gloom, gloom, gloom another way you age and have to overcome it with products. Although she does cheer up in the epilogue. I did get a copy a few weeks later, which I donated to a raffle for World Menopause Day.) What’s in it? Eventually publication day came round and I bought the Kindle edition so I could get it straight away. Which actually means you can rest assured – as far as I’m concerned, this review has no PR link whatsoever and I am under no pressure (from me or anyone else) to be nice! This meticulously researched book looking at all aspects of the stages of the menopause (before, during and after) is told in a frank and often very sarcastic manner, which took a bit of getting used to, but I enjoyed by the end. Mariella Frostup gives her personal experience in each chapter, but they also include the voices of lots of different women, and some men, and this helped to show how diverse an experience it can be. There is so much information here, that it can be a lot to take in, but I plan to get a hard copy (having enjoyed the audiobook) so that I can use it as a reference book too.This is an intelligent, well-researched and comprehensive book that will get you rethinking what the menopause it and what life looks like during and after it. Starting with a fascinating account of how our views about the menopause have been formed over centuries (largely by men), we start to understand why there are so many preconceptions and misinformed views in society. And it does it in a light-hearted way without dumbing down and without emphasising one factor or treatment over others. It is a thorough, complete guide that is a delight to read. Anyone who reads it will come away with new information and a fresh insight into the state of menopause today.

The campaigners had called their online women’s health project The Menopause Manifesto, but Jennifer Gunter, the US gynaecologist and author of a book of the same name, published last spring, strongly objected. Mariella Frostrup is one of the UK's most respected broadcasters and columnists. Her contribution to arts and literature along with her advocacy on gender and social issues have placed her at the forefront of the cultural landscape. She made the groundbreaking BBC1 documentary The Truth About the Menopause and she currently presents her own daily show on Times Radio covering issues of the day, from arts and culture to politics. She lives in Somerset with her husband and two children.

Advance Praise

With thanks to NetGally.co.uk, the publisher and Mariella Frostrup and Alice Smellie for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. My quest for inclusive information about the menopause continues. This book started well, as you might expect from a journalist Mariella Frostrup opens with a thorough and detailed description of what menopause actually is, including the difference between peri-menopause and post menopause, as well as detailing the hormones whet they do for us and how their changes affect us. It then began to lose its way a little and became much more of her own particular experience of the menopause and whilst that was helpful in understanding more about her particular issues insomnia, hot flushes and brain fog, there was less space for understanding the other numerous symptoms although some are mentioned, I would have welcomed an equally deep exploration of the full range of symptoms. I was wary about two authors – generally a journalist is hired to rewrite support the celebrity. But Mariella is a respected journo in her own right and having the two voices works well. It’s like a signpost to “Fact” and “Experience” rather than becoming blended into one. And one thing I’ve found in MenoLand is that anecdote and feelings are quite often read as “data” so there is a clear difference here.