The Hot Topic: A Life-Changing Look at the Change of Life

by Christa D'Souza

Overview

This humorous, candid, and well-researched book is a refreshing and accessible guide to menopause for today’s modern woman.

There has never been a better time to be a menopausal woman. After all, technology is such that sixty really is the new forty…

But, for Christa D’Souza, menopause created more questions than she had answers for: How can I get through menopause? How long does it last? Is hormone replacement therapy safe? What is the point of us now that we are officially biologically irrelevant? Is there a cut-off age for wearing braids?

In this fabulously confessional romp through the struggles of menopause, D’Souza shares her own insights on this phase of every woman’s life and the research that has brought her to some unexpected places—from meeting menopausal nuns in San Francisco to hunter-gathering with the Hadza tribe in Tanzania in her search for the answers to her menopause questions. She also delves into the latest science with experts around the world, discovering some surprising silver linings to this key milestone of maturity.

An insightful, empowering, no-holds-barred guide through the mysteries of menopause, The Hot Topic is a treat of a book that will demystify this phase of life and have you laughing the whole way through!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501136351
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	12/27/2016
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Christa D’Souza has written for publications including the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, and Vanity Fair and is currently contributing editor of British Vogue. In her articles, she often probes body issues such as aging, weight-control, diet, cosmetic surgery, and her own battle with cancer. She lives in London, with her partner and two sons.

Read an Excerpt

The Hot Topic

I say all the symptoms hit me like a ton of bricks. In retrospect—goodness, is hindsight important when understanding menopause—I started having symptoms five, six, maybe even seven years earlier. The night sweats, for example. Now, if you are, like me, the sweaty type (my children are hugely sweaty, while my other half barely sweats at all), it’s not something to panic about, waking up with pruney finger pads and a sopping nightie. So I didn’t pay much attention. Neither to having to pee up to six times a night. Because that’s a psychological thing, right? You think about it and you have to go—it’s the Investment Pee syndrome to the power of, well, six.

Plus my body had begun to feel different. Not bigger, exactly; more like I had added some extra duvet “cover” to it. For the first time ever, I noticed, I had back fat, with pouches of flesh sprouting around the sides of my bra strap. Meanwhile, when I looked down at myself in the shower all trace of hip bone had disappeared.

But then, perhaps, in my old age, I just was eating more food and drinking more alcohol. And, back in the olden days, where the latter had always been helpful in canceling out the former, now it did to me what it did to everybody else: it made me pig out.

Regular blood tests, which I’d been having ever since getting clear of breast cancer in 2008, confirmed the inevitable. My levels of estrogen, progesterone and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), the troika of female hormones that regulate our reproductive cycles, had been steadily descending. On the other hand, it’s remarkable how dim one can play to oneself if one desires. It was obviously just my body pushing the fuck-it button after years of being such a career dieter/drunkorexic. Maybe my gut had started to revolt against all the red wine that had been sluiced into it before it got any solids. Maybe my zaftig genes had finally decided to show my brain who was boss. That’s all it was.

And anyway, didn’t two liters of water a day and a mild obsession with hot yoga mean something? Might I belong to a new generation of women who were too fit to go through menopause? The ideation that I was a rare medical anomaly had particular traction, I found, at this point of my life.

Besides, I was still getting my period. Way beyond other people my age. Oh, boy, was I still getting it. Getting technical here, after I hit 50, they became not only regular and closer together but almost Roman candle–like in their heaviness, a gynecological indicator, as it turns out, that everything is gearing up for that one last chance to breed before it is too late. Sometimes my other half would catch me stripping the bed yet again and roll his eyes. Which made me feel guilty on the one hand and cross on the other. It reminded me of a famous article Gloria Steinem wrote in the October 1978 issue of Ms. magazine called “If Men Could Menstruate.” In it she imagined how it would become an important ritual for the beginning of manhood accompanied by lavish celebratory dinners and presents; that there would be a National Insitute of Dysmenorrhea; medical funds for heart disease would be diverted into research into cramps; and lesbians would be told all they needed was “a good menstruating man.” Brilliant. If only you guys knew what it was like.

And then, whooomph, they stopped. Just like that. The summer before last was the last summer I got my period. From that day on, I never got another (not a natural one, anyway). No more sitting down for a pee, looking at the gusset of my panties and being able to go: aha, that’s why I’ve been such a cow for the past few days. My “woman,” as some phenomenally successful Hollywood stylist I once interviewed insisted on calling it, had gone forever. And, though I should have been grateful that I had made it this far, relieved I didn’t have to play the old wad-of-toilet-paper-in-an-emergency trick anymore, all I could do was mourn its passing. Its absence every subsequent month and the cartons of unopened Tampax sitting there balefully on my bathroom shelf, gathering dust, were such concrete irrefutable proof I had passed into the “final stage.”

It got worse. Because then came all those symptoms I ludicrously assumed I’d be spared. Hot flashes. Palpitations. Hardcore insomnia, alleviated not one tiny bit by zopiclone. The complete absence of desire, as if it had been snatched, like a rug from beneath my feet. You’d think, in mitigation, the hurty bosoms and the crankiness would go after you stopped menstruating. But in my case they hung around like students who never graduate or unwanted stragglers at the end of a party. Compound that with the fact that my eldest son had suddenly gone from being five foot nothing to over six feet and had developed this habit of picking me up every time he wanted me to stop talking . . . And oh, Christ, was I beginning to fully intuit the meaning of “old” and “helpless.”

The biggest “surprise”? Probably hot flashes, though thankfully they mostly happened in bed, just after turning out my light. There was, however, one notable exception. A birthday party in a very swanky members’ club in Mayfair, London. Italian waiters in white coats shaving truffles onto the risotto; young women in head-to-toe Chanel, that kind of thing. And suddenly, this heat, out of nowhere, rising, rising from my solar plexus to the roots of my hair, my face pulsating like a sore thumb in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. In a funny, perverse sort of way, it was fascinating that my body was able to do this, without me being able to intervene in any way. But the mortification of having to keep dabbing at my upper lip and eventually having to get up, dripping, in my sleeveless summery dress and go outside, canceled the wonder of it big time.

Remember David Reuben, MD? The forward-thinking guy who wrote the 1972 number one bestseller Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)? Well, this was his description of a menopausal woman: “Not really a man, but no longer a functional woman.” But he was wrong, just like he was wrong about douching with Coca-Cola being an effective contraceptive. A hot flash doesn’t make you feel more like a man, or at least it didn’t right then. It merely made me feel the way I had done as a new girl at school, forever in fear of getting called upon in class in case I blushed: powerless and increasingly fearful of group situations . . .

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 How It Was for Me 12

2 What Is Actually Happening to You 19

3 The Extra Tog Factor 31

4 Silicon Valley, Nuns and Hot Flashes 46

5 Whales and Hunter-Gatherers. And Jane Fonda 60

6 The Case For and Against Hormones 84

7 Sex, Silver Linings and Ambition 118

8 Menopause and Marriage 136

9 Some Thinking about Drinking 147

10 A Little Bit of New Science 157

Acceptance, Andy Warhol and a Poem 174

Editorial Reviews

09/19/2016
Journalist D’Souza provides a firsthand account, crowdsourced opinion, and the latest in scientific and anthropological study in order to demystify the taboo of menopause, suggesting it be viewed as a “natural part of the aging process” rather than “a disease.” She reports her own symptoms humorously—“Overnight, apparently, I’d grown back fat”—as well as her struggle to wade through conflicting medical opinions regarding the use of hormones. She provides some illuminating information on the rise of “bio-identical” organic hormones as an alternative to traditional hormone replacement therapy. Her friends candidly describe their emotional outbursts, infidelities, and feelings about changes in their appearance. D’Souza visits a convent with a brilliant young biotech entrepreneur to discuss hot flashes with nuns and travels to Tanzania to explore a theory suggesting that older women may be the linchpin of human evolution. There has been progress regarding the stigma, she writes, wryly noting the Victorian tradition of simply “chucking women in asylums.” As a light at the end of the tunnel, D’Souza relates recent studies indicating the potential for a menopause “cure.” Despite her best intentions, this depiction of menopause is pretty bleak, but D’Souza’s sense of humor takes the edge off. This is an accessible guide for the wine-drinking, snarky woman of a certain age. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly