5 Book Recommendations: Perimenopause Edition

Broken Light- Joanne Harris

Bernie Ingram is forty-nine, menopausal, lonely. Married since the age of eighteen, with no close friends and few family ties, she feels as if the past thirty years of her life have been sacrificed to others: to her husband, Martin, who still carries a torch for a one-night stand at University; to her son, Dante, whose affection seems largely directed towards his maternal grandmother; to her boss, Salena, who runs a struggling bookshop in London’s East Finchley. Bernie’s own ambitions and dreams have been forgotten by everyone – including Bernie herself, who feels herself growing less visible, less surprising, less lovable, with every passing day. Until the murder of a woman in a local park unlocks a series of childhood memories, and with them, a power that she has suppressed for all her adult life.

The Change- Kristen Miller

In the Long Island oceanfront community of Mattauk, three different women discover that midlife changes bring a whole new type of empowerment…

After Nessa James’s husband dies and her twin daughters leave for college, she’s left all alone in a trim white house not far from the ocean. In the quiet of her late forties, the former nurse begins to hear voices. It doesn’t take long for Nessa to realize that the voices calling out to her belong to the dead—a gift she’s inherited from her grandmother, which comes with special responsibilities.

On the cusp of 50, suave advertising director Harriett Osborne has just witnessed the implosion of her lucrative career and her marriage. She hasn’t left her house in months, and from the outside, it appears as if she and her garden have both gone to seed. But Harriet’s life is far from over—in fact, she’s undergone a stunning and very welcome metamorphosis.

Ambitious former executive Jo Levison has spent thirty long years at war with her body. The free-floating rage and hot flashes that arrive with the beginning of menopause feel like the very last straw—until she realizes she has the ability to channel them, and finally comes into her power.

Guided by voices only Nessa can hear, the trio of women discover a teenage girl whose body was abandoned beside a remote beach. The police have written the victim off as a drug-addicted sex worker, but the women refuse to buy into the official narrative. Their investigation into the girl’s murder leads to more bodies, and to the town’s most exclusive and isolated enclave, a world of stupendous wealth where the rules don’t apply. With their newfound powers, Jo, Nessa, and Harriet will take matters into their own hands…

Fleishman is in Trouble- Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he and his wife of almost fifteen years separated: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, the occasional moment of tension in their co-parenting negotiations. He could not have predicted that one day, in the middle of his summer of sexual emancipation, Rachel would just drop their two children off at his place and simply not return. He had been working so hard to find equilibrium in his single life. The winds of his optimism, long dormant, had finally begun to pick up. Now this.

As Toby tries to figure out where Rachel went, all while juggling his patients at the hospital, his never-ending parental duties, and his new app-assisted sexual popularity, his tidy narrative of the spurned husband with the too-ambitious wife is his sole consolation. But if Toby ever wants to truly understand what happened to Rachel and what happened to his marriage, he is going to have to consider that he might not have seen things all that clearly in the first place.

All Fours- Miranada July

A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, checks into a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in an entirely different journey.

Broken Trad Wife- Stevie Mack

Coming soon

Hopeful the onset of perimenopause is the root of her melancholy, Elizabeth learns she is facing a third life-sentence in the gilded cage of motherhood. She must now discover how to take agency back while imagining a new happily ever-after.

Elizabeth has the traditional life she always dreamed of, only it’s all too much. The answer is the hottest talk show topic: perimenopause. Only it’s not. Surprise! She’s pregnant! When two kids are overwhelming, three feels exponentially worse. Ashamed to tell anyone about her half-wanted pregnancy, Elizabeth spirals. Elizabeth has lived her life trying to be the person her mother, then husband and children expect her to be. When she exposes her pregnancy, she accepts her fate as a pregnant Golden Girl. The moment of relief is short-lived when she suffers a devastating miscarriage.

The resulting depressive pit shatters Elizabeth’s connection to reality. When she struggles to recover, her husband sends her to a magical treehouse retreat in Mexico. She has one week to suspend her skepticism and discover what she wants from the second half of her life as she rides the perimenopause rollercoaster.