Synopses & Reviews
In a voice that is wry, disarming, and totally candid, Sandra Tsing Loh tells the moving and laugh-out-loud tale of her roller coaster through "the change." This is not your grandmother's menopause story. Loh chronicles utterly relatable, everyday perils: raising preteen daughters, weathering hormonal changes, and going through the ups and downs of a career and a relationship. She writes also about an affair and the explosion of her marriage, the pressures of keeping her daughters off Facebook while managing the legal and marital hijinks of her eighty-nine-year-old dad, and a despairing withdrawal to a tiny cabin where she combined wine and Ambien, paralyzing her arm into a claw. In one outrageous chapter, a hormonal Loh finds herself trekking to her preteen daughter's school to confront a ten-year-old bully half her size. In another she attempts to subsist on only zero-calorie noodles and the occasional fat-free yogurt in a hopeless effort to vanquish added midlife weight.
Review
"Wry, disarming, and totally candid. . . . This is not your grandmother's menopause story." Southern California Public Radio
Review
"Reads like a weekend away with the best friend you ever had--blazingly vulnerable, scorchingly smart, and funny as hell. It's both an intimate portrait of one woman as she approaches menopause and a full-throated cultural howl about what it means to be female and forty or fifty or sixty something in America today. I was filled with recognition as I read the book's first pages and flooded with gratitude by the end. . . . A beautiful book you're going to miss after you've read the last page." Cheryl Strayed
Review
"I laughed maniacally, nodded in empathy, hooted, teared up, and laughed some more. And while you could make the case that with a menopausal woman, that could have happened even had I spent the time gardening, in this case I am pretty certain it was the author's doing." Mary Roach
Review
"Loh is that rare writer who is howlingly funny on the surface and subtly brilliant just beneath. . . . . Goes down like cheap wine--fast and furiously--yet at the end, instead of a hangover, you have a bold and beautiful new view of life." Cathi Hanauer, author of Gone and editor of The Bitch in the House
Review
"[A] brave and witty memoir." Judith Newman
Review
"Does what every memoir ought to do: it reminds the reader she's not alone." New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
From an "imaginatively twisted and fearless" writer (), a hilarious memoir of middle age.
About the Author
Writer and performer Sandra Tsing Loh is a contributing editor to The Atlantic, host of the syndicated radio show The Loh Down on Science, and the author of five previous books. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays. In addition to having been a regular commentator on NPR's Morning Edition and PRI's This American Life, she has performed two solo shows off-Broadway. She lives in Pasadena, California.