A Literary Prescription for

Menopause

For the transition that medicine undertreated, culture misnamed, and women have been navigating largely in silence, until recently.

Menopause is not simply the end of periods. It is a hormonal upheaval that can affect sleep, memory, mood, joints, skin, libido, and sense of self — often for a decade or more. For most of that decade, many women are told their symptoms are anxiety, or aging, or “just one of those things.” The books, poems, and words gathered here are for making sense of what is actually happening, and finding language for a transition that has been kept too quiet for too long.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Books that take menopause seriously as a medical, psychological, and cultural event.

The Menopause Brain

Dr. Lisa Mosconi · 2024

Mosconi, a neuroscientist, makes the definitive case for menopause as a neurological event, not merely a reproductive one — explaining exactly what oestrogen does in the brain and what happens when it shifts. For anyone who has been dismissed when reporting cognitive symptoms, or who wants to understand what is happening and what actually helps, this is the most rigorous and readable account currently available.

The Menopause Manifesto

Dr. Jen Gunter · 2021

Gunter’s landmark book demolishes the myths, explains the science, and makes a clear-eyed case for what works — including an unsentimental look at HRT, supplements, and the wellness industry’s more dubious offerings. For anyone trying to make sense of contradictory information, Gunter is the equivalent of having a very well-informed friend who happens to be an OB-GYN.

Second Spring

Dr. Claudia Welch · 2011

Welch approaches menopause through Ayurvedic medicine and Chinese medical theory — offering a perspective that treats this transition as a second flowering rather than a decline. For readers who want a complementary or holistic framework alongside the medical, Welch offers something genuinely different from most of the literature on menopause.

Hot and Bothered

Jancee Dunn · 2024

Dunn’s memoir-cum-investigation is what happens when a journalist who writes funny, personal essays turns her attention to her own menopause and discovers that almost nobody told her the truth about it. It is warm, wry, deeply reported, and makes you feel considerably less alone if you are also discovering that what is happening to you was considerably more significant than anyone mentioned it would be.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café

Fannie Flagg · 1987

Evelyn Couch arrives partway through this novel as a meek, invisible middle-aged housewife and leaves it as someone who rams another woman’s car in a parking lot and announces “Tawanda!” without apology. Her transformation, fuelled in part by very real hormonal upheaval, remains one of fiction’s most beloved depictions of menopause as the moment a woman finally stops shrinking.

Miss Benson’s Beetle

Rachel Joyce · 2020

At fifty-six, having spent decades teaching a subject she never chose, Margery Benson abandons her job and sets off to the South Pacific to hunt for a beetle she has dreamed about since childhood. Joyce writes midlife reinvention as genuinely adventurous rather than merely reflective, with real stakes and real joy attached to finally going after the thing you actually wanted.

Lessons in Chemistry

Bonnie Garmus · 2022

Elizabeth Zott refuses, at every turn, to let other people decide what a woman her age is allowed to want, know, or become, channelling everything she has been denied into building an entirely new platform on her own terms. The novel’s sharp, unapologetic energy makes it a satisfying companion for anyone tired of being told to take up less space as they get older.

Poems about menopause

For when prose is not enough

Poems for the body in transition, and the self that is shifting alongside it.

“Warning”

Jenny Joseph, 1961

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me,
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.

Joseph’s beloved poem about the freedom that comes with no longer performing propriety is one of the most joyful things written about the latter half of a woman’s life — and it starts exactly where menopause tends to: in the realisation that the old rules no longer feel worth following. Consider it a manifesto.

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“Phenomenal Woman” (extract)

Maya Angelou, 1978

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
...I’m a woman
Phenomenally.

The poem never specifies an age, which is precisely the point — Angelou describes a woman who is magnetic, amused, and entirely sure of herself, and lets the reader notice that nothing in the description depends on youth. She catalogues her own presence in a room with the confidence of someone who has stopped checking whether she still qualifies as desirable by anyone else’s timeline. For anyone moving through menopause and bracing for cultural messages about becoming less visible, the poem simply refuses that premise outright, on the page, without needing to argue against it directly.

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“The Change” (extract)

Germaine Greer, 1991

The climacteric marks the end of apologising.
The chrysalis of conditioning has cracked
and a woman steps out... herself at last.

Greer’s prose from her landmark book on menopause functions as poetry in its compression and force — naming the transition not as loss but as liberation, the end of performing a particular kind of femininity for anyone else’s benefit. For anyone who has felt something like relief alongside the difficulty, Greer has a name for it.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about menopause to keep

For the difficult days, and the ones when it starts to feel like arrival rather than loss.

There is a secret in our culture, and it’s not that birth is painful. It’s that women are strong.

Laura Stavoe Harm

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Ageing is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.

Betty Friedan

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I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.

Louisa May Alcott

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The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only its meaning and purpose are different.

Carl Jung

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A woman who has no more patience with pretense, who has decided to live from her own core — that is a dangerous and magnificent thing.

Florida Scott-Maxwell

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From Georgia

Pause here, if you need to

A short practice for sitting with menopause, whenever you need somewhere to land.

Self-Compassion Meditation: A Meditation For Inner Peace

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A tender meditation on speaking to yourself the way you would to someone you love, offered as an act of quiet self-kindness.

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The Inner Peace Toolkit

Digital Self-Care Toolkit · Georgia Clare

2 guided meditations, an Inner Peace Journal, an affirmations eBook, 10 printable affirmation prints and 10 calming phone wallpapers — small daily practices to come back to whenever you need to slow down and reconnect with yourself.

Explore the Toolkit →

The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations to help you build a calm, steady daily practice — gently softening how you meet stress, anxiety and overwhelm, one day at a time.

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Questions people ask

Reading for Menopause

Where should I start?

If you only read one thing, begin with The Menopause Brain by Dr. Lisa Mosconi. Mosconi, a neuroscientist, makes the definitive case for menopause as a neurological event, not merely a reproductive one — explaining exactly what oestrogen does in the brain and what happens when it shifts. And if a whole book feels like too much today, scroll to the poems below — “The Change” by Germaine Greer can be read in a minute and asks nothing of you.

What’s the shortest thing to read here?

Start with the short forms on this page — the poems and the lines to keep — rather than a whole book. A poem or a single quote asks very little of you, and you don’t have to read in order, or finish anything.

What are some good quotes about menopause?

Quotes about menopause worth keeping include “There is a secret in our culture, and it’s not that birth is painful. It’s that women are…” (Laura Stavoe Harm), “Ageing is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.” (Betty Friedan) and “I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.” (Louisa May Alcott). You’ll find these and more in the quotes section above.

Why read when you’re dealing with menopause?

Because it helps you feel less alone. The writers here have lived through menopause themselves, and reading them is a little like being handed a lamp in the dark — not a solution, but company, and the reassurance that this has been felt, and survived, before.

Menopause

Prescribed reading

For when prose is not enough

Quotes about menopause to keep

Pause here, if you need to

Reading for Menopause

Where should I start?

What’s the shortest thing to read here?

What are some good quotes about menopause?

Why read when you’re dealing with menopause?

More prescriptions await.