Review by Booklist Review
In this marvelously candid menopause memoir, actor and producer Watts shares her experiences with and feelings about hot flashes, infertility issues, UTIs, and more. She weaves in insights from her interviews with prominent experts, including JoAnn Manson, a Harvard professor of women's health, and Bobbi Brown, the makeup mogul. The result is empowering, funny, and racy. She titles her introduction, "What the Eff Is Menopause?" When she is about to be intimate for the first time with her now-husband, actor Billy Crudup, she blurts out that she's in early menopause and wears hormone patches. He wins her over by saying he's got gray hairs on his balls. Watts offers many helpful health tips and explains that while she loves using hormone replacement therapy to prevent night sweats and keep her on an "even emotional keel," it's a personal choice. One caveat: Watts frequently mentions her company, Stripes Beauty. (Its tagline: "Skincare for down there. Honor the vag.") Overall, this menopause guide with its many humorous asides feels like a reassuring, spill-the-tea gabfest with a wise and witty friend.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Watts' stardom is a big shiny magnet, and the intimate subject matter will amp up interest in this frank and helpful menopause chronicle.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
