Margaret and Maria and Moesha and More: Perimenopause Fiction Comes of (Middle) Age (2025)

Abstract

Menopause has gained public visibility, particularly on social media, in recent years. Most menopause texts are nonfiction, but this article explores peri-fiction, an emerging subgenre of American and British literature. Like Judy Blume’s classic menstruation novel Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, peri-fiction shows readers that they have fulfilling lives ahead. The genre repurposes terms and symptoms like the hot flash, the pause, and the change to show midlife women fulfilling life on their own terms. Peri-fiction is a valuable asset to connect with patients and to culturally contextualize menopause in the 21st century.

“Menopause Needs Our Margaret,” declared a 2023 New York City documentary screening and panel honoring iconic American children’s author Judy Blume (Weiss-Wolf & Szal, Citation2023). The character in question is the protagonist from Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Blume’s beloved (and controversial) 1970 bestseller. Margaret—a smart, funny, and anxious preteen—awaits “the trappings of female adulthood” as epitomized by her much-anticipated first menstrual period (Bergstein, Citation2024a, p. 33). More than a half-century after its publication, Blume’s novel has, for many readers, become a synecdoche for girls’ puberty in all its mixed emotions. Some of those readers now yearn for an updated story chronicling Margaret at perimenopause, which is sometimes called a second puberty (Jaremko-Greenwald, Citation2025). “She taught me about my periods and now I need her to teach me (& Margaret) about menopause. Just when things get into a groove my body changes it again,” says a popular Reddit post. “Judy, I need you!!!” (Yecatz, Citation2024).

Just as Blume’s novel served as “the beginning of a revolution” in American literature that took young women’s concerns seriously, so too does the 2010s–2020s rise of mass-market perimenopause fiction herald another change (Sommers, Citation2008; Weidt, Citation1989, p. 48). Peri-fiction, as we will now call it, is a primarily American and British subgenre of about a dozen novels (growing each year) aimed at readers in midlife. These stories place perimenopause at the narrative center and typically employ a warm, witty first-person perspective. Peri-fiction provides readers with a level of popular medical information about symptoms, but even more importantly, it envisions the menopausal transition as a space of self-care, silence-breaking, and life reimagining. Just as the fictional Margaret learns that impending adulthood means so much more than the presence or absence of menstrual blood, the protagonists of peri-fiction find that the possibilities of life expand—rather than contract—outside fertility. The genre repurposes medical terms and euphemisms like the hot flash, the pause, and the change to portray the struggles, and ultimately the triumphs, of midlife women building fulfilling lives on their terms. While fiction about menopause is certainly not unique to this era (indeed, luminaries like Virginia Woolf, Colette, Doris Lessing, Ursula LeGuin, and Toni Morrison have all written about the experience before), peri-fiction is increasingly gaining its own profile as a subgenre. For instance, a splashy New York Times profile of author Miranda July declared “She Wrote the First Great Perimenopause Novel” (Solis, Citation2024). Peri-fiction is coming of age amid the combined forces of law, popular culture, and capitalism—each with their own varying motivations—raising Western public consciousness of the menopausal transition.

Now, then, is the moment to encourage the genre’s Margaret-like potential of transformative literary education. But before we explore the tenor of the times and the possibilities of fiction to help readers in need, we should acknowledge that neither puberty nor menopause has one single story. There are limitations to the genre as it currently stands; it does not sufficiently account for narratives from non-Western, non-white, queer, working-class, and childless people. For peri-fiction to accurately portray midlife as a space of continued vitality and visibility, it must expand its range of narratives. As Dr. Sharon Malone astutely observed, “we need Margaret, we need Maria, we need Moesha. We need everybody’s story to be told and represented” (Weiss-Wolf & Szal, Citation2023).

Full Moons and Hot Flashes: How Stories Can Fill in the Menopause Information Gap

The author Judy Blume’s father once explained menstruation to the curious young girl via a confusing lunar metaphor that left her thinking “that every time the moon was full, every female in the world over the age of thirteen was menstruating” (Bergstein, Citation2024a, p. 33). Around the world, there is still a shame-based information gap concerning menstruation; many families provide little or incomplete sex education to children, and classroom curricula are often uneven. Similarly, menopause education is very patchwork—even in medical schools! According to a recent study, less than a third of OB/GYN medical residency programs include menopause instruction. Furthermore, nearly 90% of respondents expressed a desire for more training and knowledge of menopause issues (Allen etal., Citation2023, p. 1002). Some of this training gap may be attributed to the drawdown in public attention and funding after the halted 2002 Women’s Health Initiative Study of hormone use in menopause (Gunter, Citation2021). The knowledge gap may also reflect a tendency of the medical profession, certainly captured in peri-fiction, to show less interest in patients outside the “clock of reproductive time” (van de Wiel, Citation2014, p. 83).

In the absence of a robust public health response, social media may be the adult’s source of menopause education. Indeed, Google searches for “perimenopause” spiked in the 2020s. The relatively new popularization of the term perimenopause is worth further discussion here both because it is key to our literary genre and because it is another example of the information gap around the menopausal transition. As readers likely know, menopause is defined as the zone of life that begins after menstrual cycles have ceased for a period of 1 year. Typically, it is a milestone reached in one’s 40s or 50s, and it affects anyone who menstruates (note that although this discussion centers on midlife menopause, the process can be induced much earlier by procedures like hysterectomy). But menopause is a bit of a misleading term for the discussion of symptoms because it is only retroactively diagnosed when the 1-year mark with no period has elapsed. In the preceding and often tumultuous years of symptoms, the body is in perimenopause. Estrogen and progesterone, the two hormones that govern the process of ovulation and menstruation, spike irregularly during perimenopause (testosterone also declines), and the hormonal chaos of these years causes physical distress for many people. The most commonly reported symptoms make for an unpleasant laundry list: hot flashes, sleeplessness, joint pain, night sweats, irregular and heavy periods, headaches, muscle loss, palpitations, weight gain, depression, and anxiety. Individual bodies differ, of course, and more intersectional analysis of symptoms is needed to fully account for differences by race, such as the finding by the SWAN study that Black women experience more severe and more long-running symptoms (Santoro & Sutton-Tyrrell, Citation2011). Overall, the National Institutes of Health estimates that 85% of women overall report living with menopausal transition symptoms, which means that a great deal of people experience episodes of distress (Grant etal., Citation2015; National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine. (Citationn.d.)).

Corporeal havoc is certainly on display in the pages of peri-fiction. “What a thing, this out-of-control body,” muses Sam in the novel Wayward (Spiotta, Citation2021, p. 257). In My Favorite Mistake, Anna depicts a hot flash as being drenched in sweat and “set on fire … for seven hours” (Keyes, Citation2024, p. 155). Meanwhile, the hands of All Fours’ nameless narrator shake and shiver, and the titular heroine of Amazing Grace Adams furiously scratches at an inexplicably itchy body (July, Citation2024; Littlewood, Citation2023). Typically, peri-fictional protagonists struggle, just as they attain the greatest amounts of authority and professional success to date, with traitorous bodies that exude heat, gain weight seemingly overnight, and otherwise misbehave. To compound these problems, the heroines confront cultural silence about these symptoms just when they would most like a sympathetic ear.

Even though we live in an age of greater openness and greater access to medical care, the historical stigmas of talking about hormones and the menstrual cycle still remain. For generations, women have been defined by their hormones, usually to their detriment. The menstrual cycle has long been a “convenient medical scapegoat” to project the gendered qualities of “unpredictability, infirmity, and instability” (Comen, Citation2024, p. 263). Such an “ovarian model of behavior” even justified barring women entrance to higher education and many walks of public life (Smith-Rosenberg, Citation1973, p. 59). In our current age, articles speculating that women’s changing hormones make them too emotional for offices like the presidency continue to be published (Holland, Citation2015; Sinclair, Citation1984). This discourse is not only demeaning but also essentializing; in recent years, language defining “womanhood” as hormonal is frequently employed to demonize trans people. This also serves as a good reminder that menopause is a diverse experience and not everyone who goes through it identifies as female (O’Reilly etal., Citation2024; Orgad & Rottenberg, Citation2024; Smith, Citation2023).

Perimenopause is also a touchy subject for many patients because it signals the end of the potential for gestation. The closing of this potential path can stir up mixed emotions. For instance, the fiercely independent and childfree-by-choice Harriett expresses frustration in The Change with her “traitorous body” ordering “her to close up shop” and denying her an “option” (Miller, Citation2022, p. 252). More ominously, women’s social value has historically been linked to motherhood. For instance, readers may remember the public furor over “preconception care,” a short-lived Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initiative urging providers to treat all menstruators as potentially pregnant (Waggoner, Citation2013). The medical establishment still “operates from the same presupposition it always did: that a woman’s health, her happiness, and even her freedom from pain are all secondary to her biological destiny to become a mother” (Comen, Citation2024, p. 313).

Furthermore, silence around perimenopause is driven by ageism and misogyny. The term “menophobic” describes how middle-aged women evaded even discussing the topic due to “shame, fear, misinformation—and, most of all, the stigma of aging in a youth-obsessed society” (Sheehy, Citation1993, pp. 6–7). Menophobic attitudes may be skyrocketing in our 21st-century digital capitalist culture, which emphasizes working for an ever-increasing portion of the life-span. Aging can be weaponized against women, who occupy more high-visibility professions than ever before, with both social and economic consequences (Calhoun, Citation2020; Greenfield, Citation2025; Gullette, Citation2004; Lupton, Citation1996). Today’s perimenopausal cohort is also assailed relentlessly by an “aspirational aging industrial complex,” preying upon “deep-seated cultural and gendered anxieties around ageing to tap into the buying power” of this ever-growing demographic (Orgad & Rottenberg, Citation2024, p. 522).

Despite all these roadblocks to public conversation, there is room to hope that in the 2020s, we are seeking new stories about menopause, aging, gender, and power. Recent menopause advocacy has built on the strengths of the 1970s women’s health movement, which critiqued medical sexism and the exclusion of women in research and which empowered patients with information about their rights (Dudley-Shotwell, Citation2020; Eldridge & Seaman, Citation2012; Nelson Citation2015). Today, popular culture seems to be following suit, exploring the biological and cultural shifts of menopause with new fervor (Grose, Citation2021; Laber-Warren, Citation2024). The menopause moment is amplified by high-profile memoirs and nonfiction guides, sharply increased newspaper coverage, social media, venture capital, and celebrity interventions. For instance, the actress Halle Berry shouted “I’m in menopause” on the steps of the United States Capitol to counter stigma (Bergstein, Citation2024b; Seitz Citation2024). In the past year alone, several popular actresses have spoken out on podcasts, PBS produced a documentary on the topic, and Oprah Winfrey made menopause discussion a feature of her media empire.

Meanwhile, many hungry titans of industry have also embraced “meno-business.” The market of products, supplements, fem-tech tools, and hormone-prescribing telehealth companies for midlife women is conservatively estimated at more than $16 billion (Andersen, Citation2023; Butkovic, Citation2021; Gunter, Citation2024; LaRocca, Citation2022). Critics have raised valid concerns about conflicts of interest and the lack of regulation around health claims in the meno-business industry. At the same time, this new large-scale investment of financial resources into midlife women’s health has the potential to unlock advances in symptom alleviation and to draw public attention (Butkovic, Citation2021; Gunter, Citation2024, LaRocca, Citation2022). Even the American government has ventured into menopause support through the 2024 White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, a Senate Bill to improve menopause care, and a Biden Administration Executive Order to “expand data collection efforts related to women’s midlife health; launch a comprehensive research agenda that will guide future investments in menopause-related research” and “identify ways to improve management of menopause-related issues and the clinical care that women receive.” United States, The White House (Citation2024) For all these reasons, it feels as though peri-fiction sits atop a cresting wave of menopause activism.

If the menopause movement is to provide “a vast fund of vital human insight,” then it needs the contributions of fictional narratives (Mackie, Citation1997, p. 20). The landscape of literature on menopause is still dominated by nonfiction texts that “have either a medical or an antimedical focus” (Marshall, Citation2015, p. 52). A recent book search on Amazon for “menopause” reflects this trend; several hundred volumes algorithmically coalesced into three main topics: self-help, medical information, and fitness and dieting (the most common theme overall was weight loss). While there is certainly reader value in these texts, it is unlikely they address the cultural experiences of sexism and ageism in depth. Literary narratives have the capacity to center the voices of menopausal patients themselves. Along with increasing empathy for the menopause experience, stories can also “widen the available, acceptable discourses on menopause,” and in so doing make this time of change “less daunting” for many anxious readers (Marshall, Citation2015, p. 52). Just as Judy Blume’s fictional Margaret learned “something of value” about herself out of the chaos of puberty, so too does peri-fiction urge readers to find transformative meaning in the transition to a new part of life (Blume, Citation1970, p. 164).

The Heat of Anger: The Hot Flash as Clarifying Metaphor

The cultural grammar of menopause is one of decline (Coupland & Williams, Citation2022; Martin, Citation1987; Sefcovic, Citation1996). Medical textbooks have long used pathologizing and judgmental discourse for menopause via words like ovarian “failure,” estrogen “deficiency,” and more. Meanwhile, medical websites frequently list symptoms “in the meanest way possible” with phrases like “sagging skin, atrophied vagina, senile ovaries” (Steinke, Citation2019, p. 94). The patients, meanwhile, are labeled with words “stronger and crueler over time” (Nuttall, Citation2023, p. 206). In the novel Woman of a Certain Rage, the heroine Eliza rattles off the words “crone, frump, battleaxe, hag, harridan, bat, bag, witch, cougar, bint, biddy,” but cannot think of “a single positive word used to describe a woman over fifty” (Hall, Citation2021, p. 22).

Peri-fiction aims to change this downward trajectory. Just as Judy Blume’s young adult canon contends that a well society provides access to education and free dialogue about sexuality, peri-fiction educates readers on symptomology so they can demand more from their care teams and reject the long-accepted wisdom that aging diminishes sexuality, mental health, and overall stability. But changing culture first necessitates exploring the age-specific flavor of sexism aimed at perimenopausal women through literary scenes of mistreatment. Peri-fiction suggests that readers reconsider the impact of the “hot flash” (the most well-known menopause symptom) not as a cringing moment of helplessness or self-deprecation, but rather as a power surge, or sharp moment of clarity. As hot flashes rip through these texts, they cause jolting realizations of gendered inequity; their frequent targets include the patronizing medical profession, ungrateful family members, and the social structures that perpetuate injustice. Whether these scenes take the form of domestic drama or revenge fantasy, they show readers that women in perimenopause can unlock untapped reserves of power within themselves and reject society’s narrative of invisibility and decline.

The hot flash is such a commonplace depiction of menopause that it is often reduced to a humorous trope, the “the middle-aged woman furiously waving a fan at her face and throwing ice cubes down her shirt” (Dominus, Citation2023). The U.S. National Library of Medicine defines flashes as “sudden-onset, spontaneous, and episodic sensations of warmth usually felt on the chest, neck, and face immediately followed by sweating.” These vasomotor symptoms are thought to result from a “central thermoregulatory function defect,” or false signal that results from shifting hormone levels. Even so, hot flashes feel all too real, and they can impair quality of life, particularly when associated with “heart palpitations, headache, weakness, fatigue, faintness, and anxiety” (Lugo & Tetrokalashvili, Citation2022). The protagonist of Amazing Grace Adams describes being “set on fire from the inside out,” while Anna of My Favorite Mistake recalls being “on literal fire” with no forewarning (Keyes, Citation2024, p. 155; Littlewood, Citation2023, p. 1). Sandwich depicts hot flashes as “humiliatingly gynecological,” like “shoveling coal into a terrible furnace” (Newman, Citation2024, p. 65). Hot flashes dysregulate women’s lives: They can strike at any time, pull focus from other tasks, and induce anxiety about one’s appearance, particularly in public settings. While their effects can be modulated somewhat by medical and non-medical therapies, it seems that the main cultural “remedy” for hot flashes is self-deprecating humor. “Is it hot in here, or is it me?” type jokes can create group bonding (Myers, Citation1994; Tomsett, Citation2018; Tsing Loh, Citation2011). Furthermore, they can invest subjects with authority “as bearers and seekers of” menopause knowledge (Wennerstrom, Citation2000, p. 313). Nonetheless, humor has its limits as a compensatory strategy; furthermore, people who suffer hot flashes must also often deal with being the butt of others’ jokes (Russell Citation2002; Steinke, Citation2019).

Peri-fiction suggests that readers supplement hot flash humor therapy with anger therapy. Irritability is already a commonly reported symptom; when Marilyn’s husband confesses to not understanding her eruption of anger in The Interruption of Everything, she tells him it’s “called perimenopause” (McMillan, Citation2005, p. 358). Anger is, of course, typically stigmatized in women (particularly in women of color), since it violates expected feminine gender norms. There is also a long medical history of responding to women’s anger with terrible interventions; in fact, early 20th-century menopausal hormone treatments were developed in part to make women more emotionally compliant wife-appliances for their husbands (Comen, Citation2024; Gunter, Citation2021). When harnessed by women in the menopausal transition, however, anger can also be an invigorating and a clarifying response. The protagonists of peri-fiction come to realize that their stormy mood is itself less important than the ageist and sexist social factors driving their dissatisfaction.

Back in 1996, one of the few television shows to address menopause (sitcom Cybill) jokingly suggested that hot flashes could be renamed power surges (Charlesworth, Citation2005). Taking up this language, peri-fiction suggests women’s power surges can productively overload some circuits before building new ones. One popular target? The medical establishment. While there are some positive doctor figures in the genre, in the majority of novels they berate the protagonists to keep quiet and accept diminished health horizons. In Calling Invisible Women, for instance, Clover is told that her distressing symptoms are “just the plight of women after a certain age” (Ray, Citation2012, p. 19). In The Change, a gynecologist ignores Jo’s request for an in-depth discussion of hot flashes; using a “flippant” tone, he barks at Jo (a muscle-bound gym owner) to “try exercise” before fleeing the room (Miller, Citation2022, p. 54). My Favorite Mistake’s Anna, meanwhile, asks for information about hormone therapy; her male doctor proceeds to deny it, scolding that “in the western world, we over medicalize what is a perfectly natural part of a woman’s life” and advising that Anna “just get on with it” (Keyes, Citation2024, p. 27).

Collectively, these scenes show that many doctors do not consider women past fertility interesting subjects worthy of attention. We see a similar disregard in evolutionary biology’s “grandmother hypothesis,” discussed in the novel Sandwich, which limits the very existence of menopausal women to a mandate to “take care of other people’s babies” (Newman, Citation2024, p. 34). While the grandmother hypothesis does show the adaptive value of societies with post–reproductive age women, it is commonly perceived as belittling and offensive; certainly it dismisses the idea of a self-directed identity, including sexuality, from the imagined lives of older women (Levin, Citation2024; Woods, Citation1998).

The novels show characters encountering barriers to effective treatment for sexual desire and health, another clue that much of the medical establishment views perimenopausal women as service workers rather than self-determining beings (Boucher, Citation2017; Dominus, Citation2023; Heath, Citation2009; Sheehy, Citation1993). In Sandwich, for instance, Rocky finds her hard-won medicine to heal painfully thinning vaginal tissue costs hundreds of dollars a month, in “infuriating” contrast to the “so much fucking cheaper” and easily accessible male Viagra (Newman, Citation2024, p. 79). Consequently, peri-fiction suggests readers get productively angry at the medical complex and demand more informed care for menopausal women. Peri-fiction features fired-up characters doing comparative internet research, preparing for appointments, pushing back through self-advocacy, and doctor-shopping when they encounter the type of condescending treatment described above.

Doctors are not the only targets of hot flash rage in peri-fiction, however. Several key scenes of anger and realization address the impact of domestic inequities. Many menopausal women explode in anger at finally having had enough: “enough times making the dinner, enough times cleaning up after people, enough … of the countless, repetitious, unthanked jobs, done without joy, often without acknowledgement, let alone reward” (Reitz, Citation1977, p. 67). Peri-heroines also short-circuit when they realize the depth of their uncredited labor. In How Hard Can It Be, Kate, the wife of a man who prioritizes his own hobbies above child care, uses hot flash language to depict anger “pouring out of” her with “all the rage and resentment which has been accruing interest in the Bank of Righteous Indignation” (Pearson, Citation2017, p. 329). Rocky in Sandwich similarly feels anger that “burns and unspools, as berserk and sulfuric as those black-snake fireworks from childhood” over “the way women have to do all the hard things and take care of everybody and pay attention to everything all the time” (Newman, Citation2024, p. 54). Here, Rocky references the particularly insidious and unseen element of cognitive labor, the “ceaseless anticipating of everyone’s needs … planning, organizing, scheduling, monitoring progress and everything else that goes into managing a household” (Daminger, Citation2019, see also Kecmanovic, Citation2024). These volatile domestic scenes recur throughout peri-fiction; as The Wife Who Got a Life illustrates, sometimes the dynamic of the overworked family matriarch stretches back generations (Bloom, Citation2021). Sometimes these conflicts lead to marital confrontation, and sometimes the end result is a family reconfiguration, whether divorce, separation, or affairs. Peri-fiction seems to mirror the real-life rise of “gray divorce” or “silver splitting,” uncouplings of the 50-plus age set that now account for about a quarter of yearly totals and are frequently initiated by women frustrated with gendered labor inequity (Brown & Lin, Citation2012; Hall, Citation2021; Roberts, Citation2013). Those peri-fictional marriages that remain are typically either already supportive and egalitarian or open to change on the spouse’s part with respect to domestic labor.

Finally, some hot flash anger in peri-fiction is reserved for social injustices. Some people experiencing menopausal symptoms report feeling like they will “burst out of [their] skin and roar like the Incredible Hulk” (Steinke, Citation2019, p. 14). The comic book superhero Hulk, a rational man who rages against tyrants under emotional stress, is an apt comparison to hot flash scenes in peri-fiction. The Change even literalizes the idea of the hot flash as supernatural gift that “arrives after the curse” of menstruation ends (Miller, Citation2022, p. 38). As the novel’s three heroines learn, this gift can bring “incredible power” used righteously to “protect those who are weaker” (Miller, Citation2022, p. 436). For instance, Jo channels the heat that “flowed through her arms like molten lava” to hit a man committing domestic violence, while her two friends use their respective menopausal gifts of foresight and herbal knowledge to defeat a serial killer (Miller, Citation2022, p. 263). Meanwhile, in Whoopi Goldberg’s graphic novel, also called The Change, protagonist Isobel Frost directs her rage over social and literal invisibility into firepower that consumes criminals who prey upon poor people (Goldberg etal., Citation2024). These supernatural scenes utilize hot flash anger while positively reclaiming elements of the witch, goddess, and crone archetypes for older women (Burney-Scott, Citationn.d.; Cusack, Citation2019; Warren, Citation2000).

Even more realistic peri-fiction, however, maintains that readers can find their inner Hulks to avenge some social injustices. In Calling Invisible Women, timid Clover summons her courage when she witnesses sexual harassment in a parking lot. Shoving the offending man in anger, she warns she will “be on you so fast you’ll never see it coming” should he “bother this woman again, bother any of us” women (Ray, Citation2012, p. 54). Amazing Grace Adams, which was deliberately patterned after the 1993 vigilante justice film Falling Down, finds Grace suffering a crescendo of sexist indignities over 24 hours until finally she too has a Hulk moment. Grace hits out at a man exposing himself to her on a train who encapsulates a lifetime of gender-based maltreatment: “He is all the men who have ever catcalled her, flashed her, threatened rape, assaulted her, terrified her, diminished her at 12 and 22 and 42, and before she knows what she’s doing, she has slammed her forehead into his face” (Littlewood, Citation2023, p. 187). In keeping with patriarchal social norms, it is Grace, not the flasher, who is penalized for the incident. Like the burden-shedding domestic mother before her, the perimenopause vigilante vents her ire at the gendered status quo.

Reconceptualizing the hot flash as a power surge is not an empty “girl power” solution that minimizes a menopausal patient’s oft-debilitating discomfort. Rather, the metaphor suggests the pain is genuine but also potentially productive, leading to clarity about the legitimate reasons for anger. The Interruption of Everything’s Marilyn eloquently expresses the liberatory power of these power surges when she reintroduces herself as “a spiritual hurricane with no name, a sassy tornado that doesn’t rip apart or shred my own needs and dreams” (McMillan, Citation2005, p. 347).

Part II: Pausing to Reflect: Matrilineal Inheritance in Peri-Fiction

In Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, periods are not the titular character’s only concern. Margaret confronts regular teenage family issues alongside menstruation angst; Blume’s novel deftly chronicles how Margaret and her mother mutually struggle to be recognized as individuals outside of their family roles. Mrs. Simon asks Margaret to “try to understand” her, while Margaret realizes “usually it was me asking her to understand” (Blume, Citation1970, p. 148). Similarly, peri-fiction chronicles moments of generational strife, as its protagonists initially reject and then embrace “becoming their mother” in both age and stature. Here peri-fiction takes its “pause,” honoring the word’s meaning of momentary respite and reflection. The heroine reevaluates her own attitudes toward older women, taking accountability for the way she too internalized ageism and misogyny. The pause ends as the protagonist chooses to move forward with intergenerational solidarity. These literary moments reflect larger generational tensions in the history of menopause activism, where the rhetorical move of blaming one’s mother’s generation for their silence is common. Yet like Margaret and her mother, the characters of peri-fiction reach a more redemptive place, drawing lessons from ancestors before them in this new phase of life.

To Anna in My Favorite Mistake, it comes “as a shock” to be called a “less-young woman” (Keyes, Citation2024, p. 14). Heroines find that the physical challenges of perimenopause are compounded by ageist and sexist negativity. For instance, Sam’s amateur comedy hour in Wayward is interrupted by the shout of “go home, ugly old cunt.” The “hate for her,” Sam realizes with a shock, was not about “what she said or didn’t say but who she was while she said it” (Spiotta, Citation2021, p. 116, emphasis added). When confronting ageism and sexism, however, the protagonists of peri-fiction must reckon with their own internalized misogyny. “Sometimes my hatred of older women almost knocked me over, it came on so abruptly,” observes All Fours’ narrator (July, Citation2024, p. 42). In Wayward, meanwhile, Sam admits to a “bout of midlife misogyny” when she automatically sides with “plant-powered, bike-muscled bodies” of young women at a political meeting against older women with “lumpish midsections” (Spiotta, Citation2021, pp. 23–24). To unpack these bouts of midlife misogyny, peri-protagonists address the anxiety of “becoming their mothers,” or occupying an uncool space of presumed social and sexual invisibility. In Amazing Grace Adams, for instance, Grace polices her daughter’s outfit and shudders to find she “has become a cliché. She has become her own mother” (Littlewood, Citation2023, p. 5). (While space does not permit a full discussion of daughters here, it is important to note that they frequently appear in peri-fiction, clashing with the protagonists over issues from clothing choices to dating; in so doing, daughters often remind the protagonists they are now on the “mom side” of the metaphorical street.) The fear of turning into one’s mother, though, is not dependent on being a mother oneself. For instance, the child-free Anna in My Favorite Mistake is horrified to visualize herself as a mother figure dancing naked on the beach shouting “we are old and saggy and we don’t care” (Keyes, Citation2024, p. 41). These textual anxieties point to the continued lack of multifaceted and nuanced models in popular culture for menopausal women.

The specter of generational dis-identification also looms large over peri-fiction’s mother troubles. Over the generations, writing about menopause has changed remarkably, but it remains a common rhetorical move to claim little informational inheritance from one’s maternal predecessors. For example, the opening page of Rosetta Reitz’s (Citation1977) Menopause: A Positive Approach describes removing menopause from “the cobwebs” and “cleaning it off” from generations of silence. Some nonfiction texts in particular express frustration at the mother’s generation for failing to change prevailing medical or cultural attitudes to menopause. For instance, Boomer women were often hailed as a critical mass who would pioneer a new way of envisioning menopause (Jacobs, Citation2017; Sheehy, Citation1993). Now, the Boomer cohort itself faces critique from Generation X, those in the birth years of 1965 to 1977 who also represent the vast majority of peri-fiction writers.

American Generation X writing about perimenopause typically adopts a posture of radical independence and resilience to disparage the prior generation. This generational friction echoes the 1990s feminist “dis-identification” between second-wave and third-wave women (Henry, Citation2004; Taylor, Citation2009). Gen X nonfiction menopause texts frequently use the phrase “latchkey kids” (the term references children left home alone after school due to women’s greater labor participation) to depict the sense of abandonment they feel from their literal and symbolic mothers. Writes Sonya Collins: “Many of those latchkey kids who were left to fend for themselves after school in the ‘80s are now fending for themselves through perimenopause” with no “map from their mothers” and only “the scrappiness you might expect from girls who were once their own babysitters” (Collins, Citation2024, see also Stubbs and Mahlin Korn, Citation2023). Playing on ageist appearance stereotypes, just like the fictional Anna in My Favorite Mistake, Amy Larocca contends that Gen X women “didn’t endure the indignities of Tae Bo just to cut their hair into tidy little bobs and accept these symptoms without a fight” (Larocca, Citation2022). In fact, as a raft of podcasts, books and menopause products labeled “not your mother’s menopause” remind us, dis-identification with the mother remains a winning strategy.

To unpack this particular perimenopausal baggage, peri-fiction characters must pause and reflect upon their own mothers, who are, as Eliza regretfully muses in Woman of a Certain Rage, “the first women we objectify, ignore and deride” (Hall, Citation2021, p. 317). While pausing for a breath, the protagonists begin to reassess their prior understandings of older women. Anna, who remembers laughing at her own menopausal mother as she “raged and wept,” now feels shame and compassion (Keyes, Citation2024, p. 29). In All Fours, the narrator realizes that the aunt and grandmother she dismissed as “crazy and vain” were in fact merely experiencing intense symptoms; she reappraises their “intensity” and “focus” and locates these female ancestors as sources of artistic inspiration rather than abjection (July, Citation2024, p. 316). Some protagonists even find that maternal figures of wisdom exist beyond the family tree. Amazing Grace Adams draws strength from an elderly stranger’s “tenderness” and “straightforward compassion.” Helping the injured Grace stand upright, the stranger tells her “You won’t be a slave to the Change forever … I know you feel like no one sees you. I’m here telling you, I see you” (Littlewood, Citation2023, p. 160).

Peri-fiction creates a generational chain that links the protagonist’s experience to mothers above and sometime also to daughters below. While the process of moving into one’s mother’s metaphorical space brings mixed emotions for the perimenopausal character, it also brings moments of grace that help move menopause discourse past the rhetoric of disidentification and generational resentment. In Wayward, Sam finds herself “soothed” to feel her mother’s “traces in every molecule, her light in every aspect” (Spiotta, Citation2021, p. 269). These stories of bond breaking and mending across generations remind us that we need increased public conversation about the impacts of menopause, not only for those in the process but for their families as well.

Part III: From “The Change of Life” to Life Changes

In How Hard Can It Be, Kate finds herself “somewhere in the middle, at the halfway mark … Janus-like … the god of gateways and good-byes, transitions and new beginnings” (Pearson, Citation2017, p. 354). Peri-fiction too is a landscape of gateways and transitions. While “the change of life” has long been a euphemism for the physiological end of menstruation, the phrase also describes the narrative changes in peri-fiction that are enabled by the clarifying anger of hot flashes and the thoughtful pauses of generational reconciliation. My Favorite Mistake’s Anna describes the change of life as “downloading the new me,” struggling to become Anna 2.0 in a culture that considers midlife women as obsolete software (Keyes, Citation2024, p. 133). In peri-fiction, this “new me” is someone who embarks upon fulfilling projects beyond the family. Through these varied projects, the peri-protagonist becomes what the narrator in All Fours calls a “full soul,” or an autonomous mid-life woman (July, Citation2024, p. 322). Rejecting the medicalized depiction of menopausal women as dry and barren, peri-fiction claims the new me/full soul as fruitful, generative, and vital to society.

In keeping with peri-fiction’s move toward generational appreciation, the full soul model pays homage to the real-life legacies of many activists. Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Josephine Butler, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and other women had incredibly productive later years (Stanton, mother of seven, called the era after childbearing the “heyday of her life, when she had the freedom to exercise her brain”; King, Citation2013, p. 4). Anthropologist Margaret Mead has also discussed the concept of “menopausal zest,” or increased energy for activism (Quental etal., Citation2023). Like most things, though, debates about what peri-menopausal women should do are wrapped up in notions of who women should be (Yalom, Citation1981). Recall the “grandmother hypothesis,” or consider the advice of Victorian gynecologist John Edward Tilt, who suggested menopausal women were fit for feminized service work, like teaching and ministering to the poor in “hovels” (Heath, Citation2009, p. 79). All Fours satirizes the idea of menopausal self-martyrdom when the narrator, panicked after her diagnosis, decides she has not “been of enough service in my life” and vows to take up hand-scrubbing gutters as a masochistic and useless way of “getting deeply involved in all sorts of helping” (July, Citation2024, p. 177). Importantly, peri-fiction does not reinforce the social stereotype that women need to be the world’s caretakers. Instead, it contends that midlife women should pursue their own gifts and, in the process, “become more assertive, self-confident, and in touch with their own needs and wants, and less interested in pleasing others” (Gaston & Porter, Citation2003, p. 61).

For some heroines, full souls are found through a literal reconfiguration of the domestic sphere. Both Wayward and All Fours address the personal and artistic rejuvenation that can be found by rebuilding “home” around their own needs. Wayward’s Sam impulsively buys a ramshackle 19th-century fixer-upper that, like herself, is both “falling apart” and “beautiful” (Spiotta, Citation2021, pp. 10–12). Though contemporary popular culture is awash in home renovation projects, this is not such a plot: Sam, living through menopause amid marital dissatisfaction and empty nest syndrome, is content to simply inhabit the home with a strong foundation. In her house, Sam is free from domestic servitude: She is “surprised to discover” she “could get up, turn on all the lights. She could cook dinner, if she wanted, watch a movie, make noise, not have to explain [herself] to anyone” (Spiotta, Citation2021, p. 47). On a similar note, the artist-narrator of All Fours deals with the change of life by checking into a nearby hotel and redesigning a generic room into a work of art, resplendent in “rich botanical prints” with “jewel-toned” touches like pink velvet chairs and green tile (July, Citation2024, p. 58). Just as Sam found refuge from domestic duty in her wayward house, so too the narrator revels at the ability to “wake up in a leisurely way, bathe” and “take my time anointing myself” far from the difficulties of marriage and motherhood (July, Citation2024, p. 130).

It’s important to distinguish between simple escapism and the pull of transformative change for these characters. Readers don’t think that Sam will stay in her ramshackle house forever, but it is a space that enables her to reprioritize herself and forge a more equitable relationship with her husband and daughter. In All Fours, meanwhile, the lush hotel room space of the room fosters the narrator’s realization that life after menopause is not curtailed. This insight is epitomized by a recurring image of a generic hotel painting that features a woman near a cave. Initially, the narrator dismisses the art in her hotel room as “one of those pictures that’s of nothing, so it won’t offend anyone” (July, Citation2024, p. 132). Stuffing it under her bed as a “cautionary portrait for women,” she declares the painting’s cave, which “had sealed up behind [the woman] years ago, when she was my age,” to represent the death of desire (July, Citation2024, p. 213). But as the narrator’s artistic creativity expands, she reconsiders the painting as a woman protecting her own peace, standing dignified like “the guards in front of Buckingham Palace or some other very important, exquisite—almost sacred—place.” The hotel room is her own version of the painting’s cave, muses the narrator, “and I was its guard. I had made a goddamn womb in it” to be “free” (July, Citation2024, p. 310). Both Wayward and All Fours suggest that readers reconsider “home” not as a house behind a white picket fence but instead as the place, however unconventional, that one finds one’s freedom.

Talking Across the Generations: Peri-Fiction Now and Future

“How many women,” asks reporter Susan Dominus, are “unsure of or explaining away menopausal symptoms, apologizing for complaining about discomforts they’re not sure are “significant,” quietly allowing the conversation to move on when they meet with their gynecologists or internists or family-care doctors?” (Dominus, Citation2023). Peri-fiction seeks to challenge a formidable landscape where both the health care system and popular culture minimize (or ignore) midlife women’s needs. Rather than fold themselves into tiny slivers of acceptable presence, peri-protagonists offer a literary model of midlife capability that helps to reframe the public conversation around menopause.

Years ago, young Margaret Simon became a part of pop culture by chanting “I must—I must—I must increase my bust” in front of the mirror (Blume, Citation1970, p. 54). Today, people in perimenopause might chuckle at her naïve enthusiasm. The chant serves as a powerful reminder, however, that life has many bodily transitions that can throw us into an anxious state. Learning from the life stories of people on similar pathways can help readers to dispel mysteries around these changes and to find community. Just as Judy Blume provided a warm, knowledgeable, and shame-free literary space for teenagers, peri-fiction does the same for those on the other side of reproductive change. These stories should take their place as part of medical humanities curricula and in the far more unofficial menopause syllabi of social media and public libraries. Peri-fiction’s accounts of anxieties, hopes, fears, and triumphs put a face on a transition that is both biological and deeply cultural.

The stories that the genre can tell are just beginning. Peri-fiction must work to build a legacy that approaches Judy Blume’s enduring hold on the public imagination. We need the stories of Margaret and Maria and Moesha and more. As the corpus grows, so too will its literary recognition and, in time, critique of its own meta-narratives. There will be new historical perspectives shared by each generation that undergoes the menopausal transition. The time for openness, and for more stories, is now. Talking honestly with others about the challenges and opportunities for midlife women may be, as Rocky notes in Sandwich, a prime reason that “we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel … I’ve been there” (Newman, Citation2024, p. 207).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data analyzed in this study consists of literary texts, newspaper articles, and academic articles. These materials are publicly accessible through JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/. For further inquiries regarding access to specific data not readily available, please contact the corresponding author.