Intermission: Women, Menopause, and Midlife

by Lyn Richards (Editor), Carmel Seibold (Editor), Nicole Davis (Editor)

This is a book about womens midlives - about the experience and consequences of menopause. It is a story about transition, the ways in which womens lives are irrevocably transformed by The Change of menopause, the changes in midlife. Menopause, the authors show, is not the drama but the intermission, the pause in a continuing performance. Intermission is based on a three-year NHandMRC survey of womens experience of midlife. The book is unusual in several regards, principally the extensive interview material with women which offers a vast store of unique and vivid pictures of womens experiences. The women offer frank, often wry accounts of the experiences of menopause and the broader implications for work, relationships, families and identity. The work is devised as a collective, representing myriad voices. It includes, as the sixth chapter, a long personal diary written by Mary Fisher over a year in Ive been bloated and exhausted all the week...in an image vein Im mourning the loss of me, the energetic, bright, articulate and alert dynamo...Ive made a conscious decision not to read any more of Germaine - I want to experience and write about my own transition. Intermission fills a major gap. Whilst there is a burgeoning literature aimed at instructing women about their midlife health or persuading them to confront the subject positively, there is a dearth of data-informed writing about their experience, and virtually nothing that allows womens voices to be heard. It challenges, among other things, almost all of the stereotypes of midlife and both the current feminist and biomedical perspectives.

254 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2000