This past weekend was publication day for Living Menopause: Rhetorics, Tensions, and Futures (Bloomsbury), co-written with these fabulous women. Well, technically, only the E-pub is available now, and the hardback later this month (by Oct 29, 2026). (It costs an arm and a leg, which seems to be the case for most academic publishing – I don’t love it but what can I do!)
From the publisher website:
Blending rhetorical analysis, qualitative research, and lived experience, Living Menopause: Rhetorics, Tensions, and Futures explores the forces that have long framed menopause as a problem to solve, a decline to fear, and a market to exploit. Against this backdrop, the authors craft expansive, agency-affirming futures for living with/and/through menopause.
Across six chapters, the authors trace how menopause circulates through medical research, workplace expectations, caregiving pressures, health applications, and popular media. They show how decades of medicalization, beauty culture, and binary thinking through various “menobooms” have constrained what menopause can mean-and what women are allowed to feel, choose, or imagine during this transition.
Living Menopause invites scholars and practitioners to join a conversation already underway-one that challenges stigma, expands agency, and opens new futures for how we understand and experience menopause. Ultimately, this book encourages readers to continue to critique and think outside current menopause discourse en route to imagining, constructing, and demanding new stories around the menopause experience.
My own chapter is a rhetorical history of the Women’s Health Initiative study, more exactly how it was used to deny hormonal therapies for menopause symptoms due to exaggerated claims of breast cancer risks. I’ll be happy to send the chapter along if you’re interested; I’m also happy to chat about it – especially as International Menopause Day is fast approaching!
Meanwhile, I’m collaborating on another related project on this theme – this time a collection of creative responses to menopause (a pretty fantastic anthology, if you ask me, currently in search of a publisher). More on that later.
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