Using Story for Connection and Health Understanding in Menopause
A Shifting Conversation About Menopause
Our ability and willingness to talk about menopause is shifting rapidly. We now see websites, platforms, tracking apps and celebrities wanting to talk about this natural transition to dispel its mystery and unexpected symptoms. Lunch or a night out with your middle-aged girlfriends is likely to include at least one reference to hot flashes, vaginal dryness or weight gain related to this phase. For many women, that setting could easily be a book club.
Books as a Bridge in Patient Care
I'm a reader. Given the choice between watching a movie, seeing live music or perusing a bookstore with a book-loving friend, I'll take the latter every time. I've always enjoyed asking my patients what they are reading when I come into the exam room and see them cradling a book or e-reader. For many of my longtime patients, this is how we connect and come to know each other better. Many will ask in return what I've been reading lately, and I try to tailor my response to something I think they will enjoy or appreciate.
Reading as a Tool for Healing
As a physician and mom of twin boys, reading outside of work was a challenge for many years. After I reintroduced reading into my life, I had an epiphany that reading could be part of the healing that happens in those exam rooms and with those patients. I'd already seen this happen when I spoke with a mother who had lost her teen daughter to an addiction, more empathetic and informed after I'd read Beautiful Boy by David Sheff. Similar exchanges had happened through other books with a patient whose child was navigating a gender transition and another whose aggressive, metastatic breast cancer was forcing her to confront her mortality.
The Mayo Clinic Read.Talk.Grow Podcast
Amassing these experiences led to the creation of the Mayo Clinic Read.Talk.Grow podcast. In a more formal way, we have explored health conditions through books by hosting conversations with authors and topic experts. Every episode features a book that is meant to be read cover to cover alongside doctors, researchers and other health professionals. Several of the episodes have focused on menopause and perimenopause. Imagine learning about and reflecting on your experience of menopause through novels, which could easily be brought to your book club or friend group.
Recommended Reading for Understanding Menopause
The Change by Kirsten Miller
In this best-selling thriller, author Kirsten Miller flips the script on menopause. Instead of featuring the all too commonly seen images of wrinkled, sweating and miserable women, the three main characters in The Change are going through menopause while developing superpowers that allow them to confront and then solve some mysterious disappearances occurring in their seaside community. The characters navigate weight gain, vaginal bleeding, mood changes while also rediscovering their sexuality, strength and wisdom. Inspired by Miller's own career and life, she does not back away from all the aspect's of menopause that we rarely heard discussed prior to its publication in 2022.
Amazing Grace Adams by Fran Littlewood
This contemporary, British novel may make you uncomfortable. While trekking across London to pick up and deliver a birthday cake to her 16-year-old daughter who wants nothing to do with her, Grace Adams is losing it. She makes rash decisions and her day takes impulsive turns. She's been a successful linguistic professional whose career, marriage and family are falling apart. She's been to see her doctor and provided treatment that would probably help – but she's carrying it around in her purse rather than using it. Our expert guest for this episode was none other than Dr. Lisa Larkin.
Sandwich by Catherine Newman
This charming modern novel is the story of Rocky, a wife, mother and daughter who has rented a familiar beach house for a week with her parents, husband, young adult children and son's girlfriend. She makes sandwiches, is sandwiched between children and aging parents, and could very well be in the Cape Cod town of Sandwich. Menopause comes with many symptoms for many women, but it's also a closure of a woman's fertility. Rocky confronts this by witnessing and enjoying her children but also reflecting on prior losses and decisions. Catherine was a return guest to Read.Talk Grow after we discussed her novel We All Want Impossible Things about being a friend to a friend who is dying.
What Fresh Hell is This? by Heather Corinna
Heather is a long-time sex educator through the site Scarlateen and navigated mysterious symptoms which cost thousands of healthcare dollars that were all essentially due to perimenopause. Inspired by these events, Heather brings their typical wit and snark to this discussion of all things menopause to offer straight advice and information for anyone navigating this potentially fraught time.
Looking Forward
Hopefully, we are just getting started. If you are navigating menopause-related symptoms, interpersonal and mood shifts, grief at the loss of no longer being able to bear a child (even if you didn't want to!) or the mysterious symptoms that come with seismic hormone shifts, we have a novel, fun and engaging way for you to consider all of it.
No doubt, you have many other health-related interests and concerns. Come along with us to discuss reproductive rights, infertility and pregnancy complications, motherhood, friendship, perioperative risk, chronic kidney disease, having a high-risk breast cancer BRCA gene variant and much, much more.
Be well, reader – through books.
About the Author
Dr. Denise M. Millstine is a women’s health internist and integrative medicine specialist at Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona. She serves as the director of Integrative Medicine in the Department of General Internal Medicine and is an Assistant Professor of Medicine. Dr. Millstine’s interests include menopause, narrative medicine, and using literature to enhance health understanding and empathy. She contributes to the Mayo Clinic Health Letter, directs the Women’s Health blog for Mayo Clinic Press, and hosts the “Read. Talk. Grow.” podcast, where she discusses books and health with authors and experts.
