I expected her to laugh, but instead Steph stopped dead between the racks. “Don’t,” she said. “Stop doing that.” I was about to say it was just a joke but instead I nodded and took the hit.

  Our friendship was forged more than thirty years ago, when I helped her find a chunk of hash lost on a dark carpet at a party. That’s a tight bond. She keeps me honest in a way that no one else can. And she was right: I don’t actually think I’m old and fat. It’s just a stupid thing I say, almost a warding spell, to keep some dark magic at bay. To keep the forces of ageism at bay.

  Stephanie works in an industry populated by people much younger than we are. She’s made a conscious effort to stop denigrating herself in work meetings. “No more throat-clearing. No more apologies.” Later, she sent me a list of phrases I should strike from my conversations:

  I’m really dating myself here.

  I’m hopeless with technology.

  Those of you who aren’t dinosaurs won’t remember this.

  I can’t remember what I was about to say. It’s probably the dementia setting in.

  The list went on. I shrank in my chair as I read it. I’d said every one of those things. Even though I’d written about the perils of ageism, about the beauty of ageing, I was also guilty of sabotaging the message at every turn. Heuchlerin, a voice whispered in my ear. Hypocrite.

  But surely the world’s made me a hypocrite, and I didn’t make the world. I just live in it, growing a little older and more vexed every day.

  * * *

  —

  “Everywhere we go, there’s still this focus on appearance. I don’t think any industry escapes that. Women are still judged on their appearance.” I’d called Jenny Godley, a demographer and sociologist at the University of Calgary, to talk about her research into ageism, but pretty soon we were talking about our own lives. Two women in our mid-fifties, scrolling past unending ads for facial serums and pants that claimed to hide the monstrosity of muffin tops.

  Godley’s research paper, “Everyday Discrimination in Canada,” using data from the 2013 Canadian Community Health Survey, shows that women experience 50 per cent more age-based discrimination than men, and they experience more of it as they get older. What surprised me was that Godley—like Lisa LaFlamme, like so many other women I know—also felt it at work.

  “I’m seen as being old now,” said Godley, who was fifty-five when we spoke. “It’s sort of like I’m past my prime in terms of a career advancement.” I asked her how this manifested in her academic career. “Well, it’s that you’re not new enough, you’re not radical enough, you know, you have kind of old thoughts and old-fashioned ideas.”

  Unprompted by me, and unaware of my hair-colouring obsession, Godley said that she’d considered stopping colouring her hair, which she’d been doing since her mid-thirties. “But then I thought, it will actually affect my career.” She laughed. “My husband doesn’t have to think about that.”

  My husband doesn’t, either. The only dye he uses is on his shoes. I once tried to moisturize his face and he recoiled in horror. His lifetime expenditure on beauty products can be measured in spare change. I expressed my surprise to Godley that even she, a demographer working in a progressive field like sociology, felt the bite of ageism. She was quick to point out her privilege—that she, like me, had benefitted from the advantages granted by race, education, and economic status.

  But one thing that all women go through, as well as some non-binary folk and trans men, is menopause. You would think that a biological transition that affects half the world’s population for an extended time would be the subject of workplace accommodations, task forces, medical and psychological interventions, musicals, telethons, entire fashion lines. Instead, silence has been the deafening default.

  “Menopause is not talked about in the workforce,” Godley said. “It’s not accommodated for. We’ve got ten or fifteen years of our lives where we have these physical manifestations of changes in our body that are going to affect how we can do our work. And that, until recently, has never been acknowledged.”

  * * *

  —

  There was a particular hell in going through menopause during a global pandemic. Where did my body’s troubles end and the world’s begin? Sure, I wasn’t sleeping and my brain was as soft as a mound of mashed potatoes, but wasn’t that true for everyone? If I was sweating, was it a hot flash or just panic about ending up dying alone in a hospital, saying goodbye to my family on an iPad?

  I was living with my family in Berlin at the onset of the pandemic, which coincided, delightfully, with the worst of my symptoms. In March 2020 Berlin began to shut down, along with the rest of the world. I would go to the Spätkauf, forget what I was supposed to buy, and come home with the same things I always bought: a bottle of Campari, chocolate bars, and my allotted two rolls of toilet paper.

  I barely knew which way was up, let alone why my skin was suddenly so itchy. “Is itchiness a sign of menopause,” I googled with my terribly itchy fingers. (It was.) My period, which had disappeared for months, would come gushing back, staggeringly heavy. “It looks like the conveyor belt at the slaughterhouse,” I emailed one friend. “It looks like Quentin Tarantino shot a movie in my pants.”

  Stuck in a foreign city with no doctor, I became friends with Dr. Google. I looked up my symptoms. I forgot what I’d looked up. Had I always been this forgetful? I couldn’t remember. Menopause was a vast hole in my knowledge. I thought I talked about everything with my friends, but I guess we didn’t. Sex, drugs, sadness, children, disappointments, successes, travel, facials, books—but very rarely menopause. Maybe it was like mentioning Voldemort’s name: you summoned the darkness by acknowledging it.

  Jen Gunter, the author and ob-gyn, likens the menopause stigma to a really bad canoe trip, where there’s no guide and no one bothers to tell you where you might end up. “The culture of menopause in our patriarchal society is something to behold. Menopause doesn’t even rate the shame that society gives to the vulva and the vagina,” she writes in her book The Menopause Manifesto. “Apparently there is nothing of lower value than an aging woman’s body, and many in our society treat menopause not as a phase of life, but rather a phase of death.”

  Silence and shame are the traditional companions of the menopause transition, she writes, along with myth and misinformation. For example, many women (and their doctors) still have outmoded ideas about menopausal hormone therapy, which is now understood to be helpful for ameliorating some women’s symptoms. “It feels as if we overemphasize risks related to MHT, and to me it even seems to go beyond the concept of infantilizing women and their decision-making skills. Medications for erectile dysfunction cause blindness for 3 out of every 100,000 men who take them, and yet society trusts men to decide if those risks are worth it.”

  The dangers of hormone replacement, the shock of the hot flash, the pain of a dry vagina—menopause, when it was whispered about at all, was a cavalcade of doom, the dreary end of a party. In the past couple of years, however, the conversation has increased in volume, and cheeriness. Now the topic is no longer verboten, and articles and podcasts and books like Dr. Gunter’s have begun to proliferate. As a giddy CBC reporter said in a 2023 report, “Menopause: It’s hot, it’s flashy, and it’s definitely having a moment.”

  Menopause has slowly emerged from the shadows of stupid jokes about moustaches and temper tantrums to assume a different cultural form. “The fucking menopause comes, and it is the most wonderful fucking thing in the world,” says Kristin Scott Thomas’s gorgeous, martini-swilling businesswoman in the British series Fleabag. “Yes, your entire pelvic floor crumbles, and you get fucking hot and no one cares. But then you’re free. No longer a slave, no longer a machine with parts.”

  You might be free, if you could only afford the price. As the menopause conversations increased, I began to see the same schisms we’ve explored elsewhere in this book. For individuals with social and monetary capital, the transition can be eased with potions and therapy and, yes, more beauty products. But for those who are already struggling, there is little help. Individual empowerment has not manifested as institutional change. In the workplace, as Jenny Godley said, it’s still every woman for herself.

  Out of curiosity, I began to look at some of the products and services on offer for perimenopausal and menopausal women. You could buy neck fans and hair masks, probiotics and hemp patches, fenugreek-seed libido boosters and an alarming product called “panty spray.” You could go on a Menoheaven retreat with other women Marie Kondo’ing their eggs. (Thank you for your service. Goodbye!)

  “We’re in the middle of a menopause gold rush,” the New York Times noted in 2022. “The market is flooding with high-profile, well-funded menopause-related beauty products and telemedicine start-ups, as well as a growing roster of celebrities willing to admit it’s happening to them. There’s the potential not only for a big cultural shift to happen, but for some number of people to profit off it.”

  And also for some people to be left behind. In the U.K., for example, one study out of the University of Warwick shows that poor women have less access to hormone replacement therapy than women with economic means. The researchers couldn’t determine why; they plan to explore the underlying causes in further studies.

  Racialized women experience inequities when confronting the menopause transition, too. Black and Hispanic women, for example, experience the onset of menopause earlier and therefore endure symptoms for longer than white women. And because of disparity in the provision of medical treatment, they may find their symptoms ignored or mistreated.

  “Here I am, sharing the messy, embarrassing, uncomfortable truth about being a woman over 50, at the height of my career, and challenged to keep up because of my biology,” Pamela Hutchinson, the global head of diversity and inclusion at Bloomberg, wrote in a much-shared LinkedIn post in 2021. “I used to be able to present without a script, ad lib, pivot to speak at a moment’s notice. Nowadays the severity of my symptoms on any given day can determine whether I am able to do that or not.”

  Hutchinson added that her menopause transition must be understood through an intersectional lens. “If we’re only tackling my gender, we’re not accounting for my experience as a Black woman. Consider this for a minute: research indicates that Black women may have longer transitions and worse menopause symptoms than White women—and we’re less likely to be offered effective therapies and receive good quality of care.”

  A diversity issue. A workplace equity issue. These are crucial elements we’re missing when we reduce menopause to an increase in the variety of vaginal lubricants available (although that’s also a good thing!).

  Hutchinson is from the United Kingdom, which is one of the few countries that has tried to grapple with menopause as a workplace issue, and as a matter of equity for all people who go through the transition. So let’s look for a moment at what has happened there.

  In 2021, the Labour MP Carolyn Harris sponsored the Menopause (Support and Services) Bill, a private members’ bill in Parliament. She recognized that the transition was not borne equally by all. “There’s a hell of a lot of women my age, working in supermarkets, in shops, and they are exhausted,” she told the Guardian newspaper. “A lot of those women are going through the menopause but they are not being treated, because in 2021 there is still not enough understanding about a condition that affects 51% of the population.”

  There was ample research to support this, included in the Menopause in the Workplace report from the Women and Equalities Committee, of which Harris is a member. One study estimated that 14 million work days per year were lost due to workers trying to deal with crushing symptoms. Women felt unsupported, discriminated against, or forced to leave work.

  The government responded to Harris’s bill by agreeing to subsidize the cost for hormone replacement therapy for women living in England (the cost is already covered in the other three nations of the U.K.). It also announced the creation of an all-party Menopause Taskforce. But it denied one of the main requests of the committee: to make menopause a “protected characteristic,” so that menopausal workers wouldn’t face retribution for, say, needing time off. The Conservative government rejected this proposal, claiming it might lead to discrimination against men with long-term medical conditions. The government also nixed a proposal to launch a pilot project on menopause leave.

  Harris and her fellow campaigners were disappointed at the government’s lack of action, but from this side of the pond I was amazed at what they had accomplished. I was stunned that there was any government action at all on menopause. An all-party committee, imagine that!

  It’s not that we don’t have the same problems as women in Britain and around the world. The Menopause Foundation of Canada’s 2022 report The Silence and the Stigma revealed that three-quarters of the women surveyed felt unsupported at work when it came to the transition. We have the same challenges here—it’s just that we’re so far behind in acknowledging or improving them.

  But there is action, and I take hope from that. The U.K. has just launched the world’s first menopause education program, which will be shared with individuals and employers (learning about menopause is already part of the British secondary school curriculum). Some companies have put policies in place for workers who are going through the transition, and others have appointed “menopause ambassadors.” I hope this will become common practice—not just because it’s well meaning, but because it makes economic sense. You want to keep half your employees happy in the prime of their lives.

  The prime of our lives—do we believe that? Will our spirits break free of the expectations that have kept us earthbound for so long? Do we truly have no fucks left to give?

  * * *

  —

  A friend wrote to me: “I’m trying to find a path for the next one-third of my life, whatever that will look like???” She had left a lucrative and well-established career after her boss yelled at her. It wasn’t the yelling, she explained. She was just tired of the wheel. She was going back to another wheel—her first love, pottery—and trying to figure out how to live outside of other people’s expectations. She ended on a high note, one I could understand. “I. Just. Don’t. Give. af.”

  I didn’t either, by that point. All around me, friends in their fifties were quitting their jobs, taking early retirement, getting divorced, going to live on farms, howling at the sky. It was like we were all starring in a Nancy Meyers movie, only with fewer linen tunics and less financial security. “Do you think it’s too late to become a postal carrier?” asked my friend Jen. I told her she should try.

  There was fear (of a financially desolate future), but also I sensed among us a mood of giddy adolescent rebellion. A blossoming, at our age! We were living longer. Our bodies were still holding up, and we lived in a country with public health care. We could step off the wheel, lie down and stare at the clouds, choose another wheel or live wheel-free.

  One friend, stylish and well-groomed, disappeared into the country, where she spent all her time calculating the area of a chicken run. Another published her first novel at the age of seventy-two. All of us, together, were defying the tired stereotype that women become invisible in midlife. That supposition prevails if we see ourselves only as the object of others’ desires. We were not invisible to ourselves. On the contrary, we were just coming into view.

  I can’t remember when I seriously started to consider leaving my job, but I blame it all on the celebrated American historian Nell Painter. (Sorry, Dr. Painter. You’re a genius, but you also planted the dangerous seed of freedom in my brain.) I read Painter’s book Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over when it came out in 2018, and it blew my socks off. It carried my socks into a different stratosphere, and my soul with them.

  Painter was a professor of history at Princeton University and a celebrated author when she decided, at the age of sixty-four, to take her ambition to a new place: she would honour her early love of drawing and go to art school, first to Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, and then working toward an M.F.A. at the Rhode Island School of Design.

  As you can imagine, Painter’s colleagues at Princeton were intrigued, maybe envious, and certainly baffled by her decision. “Why do something different? Why start something new? Why did I do it? What made me think I could begin anew in an entirely different field from history, where, truth be told, I had made a pretty good reputation?” She was ready with her answers: “Because I wanted to. Because I could.”

  This was thrilling to me. Thrilling. I’d always been fascinated by late creativity, and when I was a correspondent in London I found myself interviewing many women who’d bloomed and flourished in what we were supposed to consider “old age.” There was Diana Athill, the brilliant editor and writer who had a smash hit with her memoir Somewhere Toward the End, published when she was ninety-one. I interviewed the novelist P.D. James three times, and during our last talk she told me she’d worked up the courage to take on her beloved Jane Austen for her final novel, Death Comes to Pemberley, published when she was also ninety-one. I’m not ashamed to admit I had a little girl-crush on both of them.

  * * *

  —

  Late blooming, it turns out, takes a hell of a lot of work. Or as Nell Painter once said, “Being old in our society, it’s not for sissies.” When she arrived at art school, a fellow student asked Painter’s age, and recoiled at the answer. One instructor told her she’d never be an artist; another told her she wasn’t “hungry” enough. She was racially profiled on her way to her silk-screening studio. She straightened her hair in a bid for currency but didn’t colour it.

  Along the way, she drew and painted, iteration after iteration in search of meaning. She found profound meaning in the works of Alice Neel and Faith Ringgold, with their clear-eyed depictions of older women’s bodies. Maybe she lacked the quality that her teacher called “right nowness,” maybe she was misunderstood by her classmates, but she saw.