Are you there God? It’s me, perimenopausal Menaka Premium

Exploring perimenopause through personal experiences, literature, and online research, shedding light on a topic often overlooked and misunderstood.

Last week, I asked Google if itchy breasts were the result of wearing a poor quality bra, or perimenopause. Then I conducted an in-depth investigation into the ties between falling hair and falling estrogen levels. On Reddit.

Soon after, ChatGPT and I had a tete-a-tete about poor memory. Was I struggling to remember someone’s name because I wasn’t paying attention when we were introduced, or because of perimenopause?

‘Honestly, it could be either or neither!’ the chatbot responded. Very helpful.

I find myself asking the internet a lot of questions about perimenopause. It started last year, while working on a project that touched upon menstrual and menopausal health in the workplace. While the women on the team took great pleasure in schooling the men about menstruation, we quickly realised how woefully inadequate our own knowledge around menopause was.

And so, down a terrifying rabbit hole I went, reading about everything I could find that was menopause related: from brain fog and anxiety, to vaginal dryness and night sweats of biblical flood proportions. It seemed as if any and all horrific things a woman might experience with regards to her physical or mental health post the age of 35 might be because of menopause. Or, as the chatbot told me—it might not.

It was around the same time that I read Miranda July’s All Fours. Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in fiction this year, The New York Times called it “the first great perimenopause novel”. It was being hotly discussed among select groups of urban women in their 40s back then, thanks to a newfound ease about sharing midlife experiences. The book’s protagonist is a 45-year-old artist who abandons her plans to drive from LA to New York solo soon after embarking on the trip, only to check into a motel room not far from her own home.

In the first part of the book, she transforms the room into a jewel-like sanctuary, and then begins an affair with the decorator’s husband, a younger man who has dreams of becoming a dancer while working at the local Hertz rental. The novel is tender, deliciously dirty, and outrageously funny, raising questions around desire, libido, longing and freedom that were at times uncomfortable and at others, felt like a clarion call. But it was the second half that stayed with me, where the protagonist’s female friends shared their own experiences around perimenopause.