Gather Flash Count Diary: Menopause And The Vindication Of Natural Life Crafted By Darcey Steinke Readable In Version

found it difficult to find books or online articles about menopause that aren't heavily weighted for either favour or disdain of hormone replacement, I have my personal tendency about how I would prefer to travel this path, but I've been wanting to read personal experiences about menopause, not enter into the heavily preached on both sides fray.


When Farrar, Straus, and Giroux offered the ARC for review, I was impressed by the synopsis because it seemed to be very much what I've been looking for.
And on the whole, it is, The caveat here is that because it truly is nearly impossible to discuss this event in women's lives without including some of what is the most currently discussed medical practices surrounding it, Steinke doesn't fail to include her opinion.
Not that she shouldn't have not that I expected her not to do this, Just a heads up to other women who may be looking for the same sort of reading I have been seeking, She includes the fascinating history of how hormone replacement became a standard practice in the United States and statistics/studies of associated risks,

However, this isn't solely about all of that, Instead, this memoir is a wildly hybrid accounting of history, science, spirituality, nature, medicine, folklore, advertising, and, above all, deeply personal memoir,

There's a lot of conflict here an example is that Steinke relates how her own sexual drive and that of her friends and other women, changed while going through menopause and how the greater male dominated society wants them to remain willing and pliable and sexual when they have physical and physiological changes that may make them reluctant.
Then she turns around and explains how orcas, the only known mammal on earth that also goes through menopause, remain sexually adventurous within their pods and that "in their culture.
they don't have that human taboo: don't sleep with old women, " This feels like a contradictory lament, That's just brilliant to me as a reader, though if you know someone going through menopause, or have gone through or are going through it yourself, you know damn well that almost everything about the process can be a contradiction sex drive, physical changes, emotional changes, life circumstances, social interactions, and psychological interactions moments of simultaneous despair and joy.


There is a general bent here towards the nature/natural/spiritual side of this process and you'll definitely feel akin to her experience if you're already geared that way.
You don't need to be, though, as it's quite relatable with some amazing writing regardless, The only generally targeted audience I wouldn't recommend it to would be those absolutely,committed to hormone replacement and won't brook an argument otherwise,

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher making this one available for me to review, It comes out in the States on Juneth, I just sped through it, horrified and enlightened, fascinated and heartened, It's a fantastic and honest memoir in a category sorely lacking, Flash Count Diary is a new story about the menopause, Every woman should read this Flash Count Diary, Most books are about how to get rid of hot flushes, but there's nothing on the scientific and self help of menopause, This book goes into what happened to Darcey Steinke during the nights when hot flashes occurred, And what other remedies are out there on the market, The saddest thing is the terrible jokes that are said about menopause, One of the most interesting parts was when Darcey went to a conference centre in Amsterdam to learn about how women in other countries were treated during the change, It's about damn time. Three paragraphs in, I was crying with the profound relief that comes with having one's experience finally, finally recognized not just in a commiserative way about the physical aspect though, that too but in the larger philosophical and spiritual questions that come up about mortality, gender, and nature.

We should all be talking about this aspect of human life, and Steinke fucking nails it, is what I'm saying, Not for me. I found nothing enlightening in it, The author started this book because she couldn't find very much written about the process of menopause except where it is treated as a "disease" that needs to be treated.
She did research and each short chapter covers a different aspect of what she discovered, Not surprisingly, little research has been done after all, it only affects women, She attends a European conference on menopause where the male doctors dominate the conversation and focus everything through the lens of what men want from their sexual partners and what treatments women can use to maintain a semblance of youth.
She learns that few species have a postreproductive phase of life but that one species that does are orcas, She studies the information about them and discovers that it is the postreproductive females that lead the family groups because they have the most knowledge and experience and the freedom of not having to care for their own infants any longer.
It is not dissimilar to what is found in huntergatherer cultures, She talks to women who mourn what they have lost and to women who are grateful for their newfound freedom, I highly recommend this book for any woman who is approaching or has already gone through menopause for some different perspectives, This is not a book that will tell you how to treat or suppress the physical, emotional, or psychological effects of the process, It documents them but is not a selfhelp or pseudomedical guide, There's a lot to like about Darcey Steinke's book Flash Count Diary, most especially it's piercing critique of the medicalization of menopause, the transformation of a normal life event into a disease to be cured.
Her skewering of men particular those who are doctors who believe menopause is all about driedup vaginas is particularly on point, Her quest to connect with other animals who experience menopause is also quite moving,

But a couple of things didn't sit right with me, First, Steinke talks about becoming more androgynous with menopause, and feeling increasingly outside the binary of male and female, She does not, in saying this, claim a nonbinary or trans identity, but she does use the stories of nonbinary and trans individuals to bolster her point that a change in hormones means a change in self.
I was deeply uncomfortable with Steinke using the stories of trans and nonbinary individuals' hormonal transitions to prop up her feelings about menopause, While Steinke would argue there is a great deal of common ground between menopausal women who are trying to grow used to a new self and trans and nonbinary folk deciding on hormonal transition to bring their bodies into accord with their self, I don't think it holds up.
And there are power differences between the two situations that are never addressed, For many trans and nonbinary people transition is about survival, and 'surviving' cisness is not the same thing,

This is also a book that barely considers race, Steinke presents ciswomen's experiences as universal, but there are real, meaningful differences in the ways that women of different racial groups experience sexuality and gender, even if they're straight and cis.
There's no consideration here of the way that Black women's sexuality has been commodified, strangled, and exaggerated by white culture as a means of devaluing Black women's bodies, autonomy, and community.
There's no consideration of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, and the way that white men have been socialized to believe Native women's bodies are theirs for the violent taking, There's also no space to consider that menopause is looked at differently within human groups that her experience as a white woman is not necessarily the same as that of a ciswoman in other cultures in America, where aging is not so reviled.


I'm glad I read this book, because we all need to talk more openly about menopause, I learned things I'm glad to know, But I can't exactly recommend the book given the major flaws, I really wanted to like this book, having picked it up after reading a few thoughtprovoking excerpts and interviews, It has its insightful moments, but overall its just not very good, The authors entitlement is a constant distraction, as are the cultural criticism contortions she puts various texts and situations through to underline her/our oppression, She obviously read widely on the topic before writing, but doesnt engage much with the books she namedrops, instead sprinkling each chapter with aphorisms like a college student trying to meet a minimum word count.
Anyone who picks this somewhat obscure book up surely reads a lot, and surely has some awareness of how older women are viewed and treated in literature and in life, so I expected more than a de Beauvoir quote here and a Judy Chicago reference there.
The section about killer whales the only other mammals whose females have long postreproductive lives was the highlight, a new way of thinking about our aging as animals, I also enjoyed the chapter about her mother, which let the particular reveal the universal, The various chapters never gelled as a whole, though, I couldnt tell what it was supposed to be, and I dont think the author could, either, The worst take on menopause I have EVER READ, This book is trash and I am mad I spent money on it, The author looks down on women who would consider HT to “hold on” to the fertile period of their life and just become “compliant and fuckable”, How about if a woman just wants to not feel insane For herself Garbage, Menopause hit Darcey Steinke hard, First came hot flashes. Then insomnia. Then depression. As she struggled to express what was happening to her, she came up against a culture of silence, Throughout history,

the natural physical transition of menopause has been viewed as something to deny, fear, and eradicate, Menstruation signals fertility and life, and childbirth is revered as the ultimate expression of womanhood, Menopause is seen as a harbinger of death, Some books Steinke found promoted hormone replacement therapy, Others encouraged acceptance. But Steinke longed to understand menopause in a more complex, spiritual, and intellectually engaged way,

In Flash Count Diary, Steinke writes frankly about aspects of Menopause that have rarely been written about before, She explores the changing gender landscape that comes with reduced hormone levels, and lays bare the transformation of female desire and the realities of prejudice against older women, Weaving together her personal story with philosophy, science, art, and literature, Steinke reveals that in the seventeenth century, women who had hot flashes in front of others could be accused of being witches that the model for Duchamp's famous tant donns was a postreproductive woman and that killer whalesone of the only other species on earth to undergo menopauselive long postreproductive lives.


Flash Count Diary, with its deep research, open play of ideas, and reverence for the female body, will change the way you think about menopause, It's a deeply feminist bookhonest about the intimations of mortality that menopause brings while also arguing for the ascendancy, beauty, and power of the postreproductive years, .