Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I'd Known About Menopause

by Naomi Watts, Mary Claire Haver MD (Foreword by)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Menopause is coming, whether you're ready or not, so best you get as ready as you can. Look no further than Naomi Watts to accomplish that, with this sassy and stark guide to getting older.

A frank, funny and informative guide to menopause and aging by beloved actress Naomi Watts, one of the leading voices in menopause awareness—with a foreword by Mary Claire Haver, MD, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The New Menopause
 
At thirty-six, Naomi Watts had just completed filming King Kong and was trying to start a family when she was told that she was on the brink of menopause. It is estimated that seventy-five million women in the United States are currently dealing with menopause symptoms (dry itchy skin, raging hormones, night sweats), and yet the very word “menopause” continues to be associated with stigma and confusion. With so little information, many women feel unprepared, ashamed, and deeply alone when the time comes.
 
This is the book Naomi Watts wishes she had when she first started experiencing symptoms. Like sitting down over coffee and having an intimate chat with your girlfriend, Dare I Say It blends funny and poignant stories from Naomi and her friends with advice from doctors, hormone experts, and nutritionists to take the secrecy and shame out of menopause and aging. Answering questions such as: What’s hormone therapy and should I be on it? Will I ever sleep again? Will I get myself back? What happened to my libido? Do I need eighteen serums for my aging skin? Whose body is this anyway? Who am I now? Naomi Watts shares the most up-to-date research on how to manage menopause symptoms and tackle the physical and emotional challenges we encounter as we age.
 
Irreverent, bold, and reassuring, Dare I Say It is the companion every woman needs to embrace the best version of herself as she moves into what can be the most powerful and satisfying period of her life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593729038
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/21/2025
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	9,648
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Naomi Watts is a renowned actor and producer. She has Academy Award nominations for her performances in 21 Grams and The Impossible, and is also known for starring in critically acclaimed projects such as Mulholland Drive, King Kong, and, more recently, Feud: Capote vs. The Swans. She is the founder and chief creative officer of Stripes Beauty, a company dedicated to raising menopause awareness and providing women with education, community, and solutions for a holistic approach to menopause.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Discomfort Zone

When I was forty-two, not long after my second baby was born, I started having strong, consistent menopause symptoms. My most significant symptom was night sweats. But I had the occasional hot flash during the day, too. I remember two of them distinctly.

One time I was on a plane when a hot flash came on. In that moment, I felt like I was being suffocated. The heat was overwhelming, but the feeling was less like being in a warm climate than like being flooded with shame. I was overcome with the feeling Oh my God, I have to get out of here right now! But I was in a middle seat, and I’d already gotten up for the bathroom a couple of times—much to the chagrin of my seatmate, who’d given me plenty of side-eye looks—so I stayed hunkered down, wishing I could be anywhere else. If there had been an eject button, I would have hit it, right after flipping the bird to the dude in the aisle seat.

Another time, I was taking a fun trip with friends, and we were on a big boat in the Pacific Ocean. It was one of the first times I’d tried to take a glamorous vacation with my toddlers, and I was thrilled to be out on the water in a cute summer outfit. I was suddenly drenched. I barely had any clothes on, but I felt I had to remove even the stringy bits of fabric and dive into the ocean! Even if the boat was moving in shark-infested waters, I thought, I have to get in the cool water immediately.

“This was the year the wheels came off,” one woman told me about her own experience of realizing that she was entering a new phase of life. While she was having the classic symptoms related to blood vessel dilation and constriction (hot flashes, night sweats, heart palpitations), she started having symptoms in just about every area of her body: mood changes including depression, anxiety, irritability, and rage; skin changes, including somehow both dryness and oiliness; sleep trouble; hair loss on her head coupled rather cruelly with its growth on her face; vaginal dryness and associated sexual problems; loss of libido; migraines; brain fog; UTIs; GI issues; incontinence; and even ringing in the ears. It took her and her doctors a while to realize that they were all connected to menopause.

The symptom most strongly associated with menopause is the phenomenon known as “hot flashes,” or “hot flushes” in the United Kingdom. (Some doctors in the United States also prefer the term “flush,” because the sensation comes on more like an all-over drench than like a lightning strike, but I’m going to stick with “flash” in this book because I’ve spent the past thirty years in America, so it’s what I’m used to.) They can be among the more aggravating issues to deal with at this age, especially because they seem to come on at the least convenient times, since they can be triggered by stress.

My friend Sarah described her hot flashes to me this way: “One weird obsession became shifting my body to one side or another at night and touching the sheet, marveling at how it was as if someone had just removed an electric blanket set to level ten—so incredibly hot to the touch! The biggest surprise for me about hot flashes is how different they feel than just being superhot on a summer day. They are so intense and immediate. I’m feeling fine . . . feeling fine . . . Oh my God, someone get my fan! Throw ice on me! I don’t care if I’m fully nude in public!” She said this phase of life could be summed up as “ripping one’s clothes off while on college tours.”

I can’t tell you the number of women I’ve talked to who were in an important meeting at work or having a difficult conversation with a partner and suddenly they found themselves sweating profusely, feeling as though they were in a hot yoga class while everyone else was comfortable as could be. The first time I had a hot flash I thought, Who turned up the heat? Who is to blame for this? Like when your pants won’t button and you’re sure that the machine has shrunk them in the wash.

For me, night sweats were common even though I nearly have to kill myself in an exercise routine before I can work up a sweat. Even now, in spite of hormone therapy, I’ll wake with an occasional chest sweat, smelling like I’ve been flipping burgers in a fast-food joint all night. (Dermatologists have told me that middle-aged women increasingly are showing up in their offices for underarm Botox, which turns off the excessive sweating!)

One of my makeup artists says the first time she ever witnessed a hot flash was at work: “An actress was sitting in my makeup chair and said, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s coming. It’s coming!’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? What’s coming?’ And she said, ‘Look at my face.’ All of a sudden, her skin got really red, and beads of sweat started forming on her upper lip. This was a woman playing a leading lady and wearing sexy clothes. We got her some ice water, and we put cold compresses on her face until she cooled off.”

Hot flashes are caused by hormone fluctuation. The body’s thermostat gets thrown out of whack by not having the usual amount of estrogen, and so it sends signals saying it’s too hot. The body responds by opening up blood vessels, causing sweating and flushing, usually for a few intense minutes.

There are plenty of reasonable things to do to combat hot flashes. Some simple, obvious tips: wear layers so you can strip down quickly when a hot flash starts and use breathable cotton fabrics. Make sure you get sleep and drink water. Monitor your triggers and try not to eat or drink things that bring hot flashes on, like spicy food or alcohol or caffeine (basically everything fun). Chug ice water or put an ice pack on the back of your neck if you feel a hot flash coming. A friend of mine swears by her portable neck fan, which looks like headphones. I know what you’re thinking: no ice pack or cute fan is going to save me when I have a hot flash.

“Hot flashes are really just the tip of the iceberg,” Dr. Sharon Malone told me. (This is an ironic metaphor; there is nothing cool about them!) “We treat them because we have found that severe and frequent hot flashes are harbingers of an increased risk for cardiovascular disease and can be a risk factor for Alzheimer’s Disease as well.

“Women with hot flashes have disrupted sleep. Disrupted sleep can lead to more cardiovascular disease, more depression, more irritability, and even weight gain. So while we make jokes about hot flashes and people make light of them, hot flashes are the canaries in the coal mine for other long-term health issues that surface after menopause. And women need to understand that hot flashes are not benign, and they’re not funny.”

Before I entered menopause myself, I hadn’t known that there were any symptoms beyond hot flashes, night sweats, and mood swings. I’d had terrible migraines for years. They would last for three days, right in the same point behind my left eye. Sometimes it would be just a dull ache, but other times it was completely debilitating, and anything could set off a migraine. It didn’t always come from an extra glass of wine or too much sugar, though those were reliable triggers. Poor hydration was often the cause, or too little sleep. I was never able to take three days off of work and childcare to recover, but if I didn’t catch an oncoming migraine with the right meds right away, that’s how long it would last. So I would suffer through it. I found these migraines very depressing. And not once in all those years did anyone mention they might be a menopause-related symptom.

Just when I felt like I was getting a handle on migraines, I started getting urinary tract infections, incessantly. The UTIs were causing me to go on antibiotics, which were then causing GI issues—blockages and bloating. I went to the doctor, who said to start using Metamucil and drink lots of water. And that was all the help I was given.

My GP never said, “Well, this is probably related to menopause, and here’s what you should do.”

So I threw random short-term solutions at the problem. I remembered in my twenties using Ural “urinary alkalinizer” powders from Australia, which make urine less acidic and eliminate some of the burning feeling of UTIs. Now, many years later, I’ve learned that the powders are available online, even from Amazon, in cranberry or lemon flavors, and so from time to time I order them. But no matter how many products you throw at UTIs, they’re still annoying and incredibly painful.

One day during the pandemic, I was in extreme pain from a UTI, and none of the usual drugstore remedies—including cranberry juice, Azo, and Advil—were working. I got in touch with my doctor, who was at a baseball game. (No matter how many telehealth visits I’d had, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I felt like I was being run around in circles, and the doctor was also incredibly hard to reach.) I could barely hear him over the roar of the crowd. He said, “No, it’s fine. Just go on this antibiotic, pick it up from the pharmacy and dah, dah, dah.”

I put the phone down. It was the fourth course of antibiotics I’d been prescribed in a short period of time. I felt like he was brushing me off, as though I was complaining too much or being a hypochondriac. I thought, I need help. Isn’t it your job to provide it?

Editorial Reviews

01/20/2025

In this lukewarm debut guide, actor Watts offers familiar advice on navigating menopause. Her lack of medical expertise hampers discussions of the biology of menopause and how to treat symptoms. For instance, her explanation of how “hormone fluctuation” induces hot flashes is rudimentary, and the suggestion to place an ice pack on one’s neck for relief is unsurprising. A chapter on nutrition recommends intermittent fasting and probiotics but warns against the keto diet, whose restrictions on carbs rule out even such beneficiary fiber sources as legumes, but there’s little discussion of how these dietary choices affect menopausal women, specifically. Watts is at her best when drawing on her own experiences to capture the complicated emotions that accompany menopause, as when she shares how ashamed she felt about having perimenopausal symptoms in her mid-30s. Elsewhere, she reveals how her struggles to conceive because of her early symptoms induced guilt over her imagined mistreatment of her own body, and she offers an enraging account of how male doctors repeatedly dismissed her concerns because of her relatively young age. Though the more personal passages will be a balm to menopausal women looking for affirmation that they’re not alone, the guidance leaves much to be desired. Readers would be better off with Mary Claire Haver’s The New Menopause. Agent: Cait Hoyt, Creative Artists Agency. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

I stand in admiration of Naomi Watts for tackling the verboten subject of menopause. She is frank, funny, and fearless. Women all around the world will be grateful for her guiding light, as I know I am. Naomi is an American hero (even though no one really knows where she’s actually from).”—Chelsea Handler, New York Times bestselling author of Life Will Be the Death of Me. . . and You Too!

“Naomi Watt’s book, Dare I Say It, simultaneously educates, destigmatizes, and personalizes this universal female experience called menopause. Her book is clear, well-resourced, and provides a balanced approach to navigating the challenges of menopause. By sharing her story, she is showing women how to minimize suffering and maximize their health and happiness as they age. A must-read for every woman over thirty!”—Dr. Sharon Malone, New York Times bestselling author of Grown Woman Talk

“Wow! Dare I Say It is much more than a book about menopause—it’s a revolutionary guide, best friend, and expert wrapped into a fun-to-read package. Watts writes openly about her own story while beautifully weaving in cutting-edge research and expert opinions. A must-read for all women and those who care about them.”—Eve Rodsky, New York Times bestselling author of Fair Play
 
“With humor, vulnerability, and wisdom, Dare I Say It turns the often taboo topic of menopause into a conversation that is not only necessary but long overdue. This book will resonate with women everywhere seeking guidance, solidarity, and the reassurance that they are not alone in their journey.”­—Dr. Lisa Mosconi, New York Times bestselling author of The Menopause Brain

From the Publisher

★ 2024-11-08
Destigmatizing and demystifying menopause and its effects.

In the voice of a wise but self-effacing older sister, actor and entrepreneur Watts offers an engaging contribution to the growing body of publications that seek to enlarge and center discussions of menopause and the dizzying range of its physical and psychological effects on women and their families. Citing research from more than 50 doctors and credentialed experts on women’s health, Watts elucidates the effects of menopausal symptoms and explores treatments for many of them, including fluctuating sex hormone levels, disrupted sleep, anxiety, hot flashes, brain fog, weight gain, UTIs, and heart palpitations. The roll call of corporeal discomforts is harrowing, but the author shares with brio and humor many of her own experiences with these symptoms and their subsequent remedies, organically interleaving disarming stories about her fertility struggles and the menopausal symptoms she began experiencing in her mid-30s, around the same time she began to seriously consider starting a family. The medical experts Watts interviewed share actionable advice on alleviating menopausal symptoms through diet, exercise, and sleep hygiene. They also discuss hormone replacement therapy at length, which was first available in the 1960s. HRT grew increasingly popular through the 1990s, but in 2002, the Women’s Health Initiative made the now-discredited announcement that HRT had carcinogenic effects on some women. HRT has been making a comeback, aided by Susan Dominus’ 2023New York Times article, “Women Have Been Misled About Menopause.” Watts herself has been a happy beneficiary of the treatment. Perhaps what’s most winning about this book, ultimately, is its author’s pro-aging message.

In a society that values youth above all else, Watts celebrates women’s inherent value, no matter their age.

Kirkus Reviews