Hot Flashes: Women Writers on the Change of Life edited by Lynne Taetzsch
Faber and Faber, 1995
180 pages; hard cover, $22.95Reviewed by June Owens
Winner of Chaffin/Kash Award, the Colquitt and McIntire Prizes, for Poetry
Contrary to what the book jacket tells us, Hot Flashes is no mere "collection of twenty personal essays and five poems by women writers on the experience of menopause." It is a landmark assemblage of engaging, insightful, courageous writing by some of our literary best on a fascinating yet difficult subject, "the change of life." A timely book, it is charged with integrity.Editor Lynne Taetzsch has applied great skill in selecting the individual entries. Poems by Margaret Gibson, Marge Piercy, Susan Terris, Elisavietta Ritchie and Alma Luz Villanueva are scattered among many prose writers. Fortunately, neither the editor nor her roster of excellent writers try to explain the causes or effects of menopause.
Menopause is not, these writers show us, the memento mori of a woman's life. It is her rite of passage into freedom. It is the fulfilling journey that a woman and her sister-women everywhere mutually share. It is not just another "curse." While each author approaches the theme menopause differently (by virtue of varying voices), when the voices are conjoined, the work becomes a "chorus of voices." If one has time only to browse Hot Flashes, then one should not miss Villanueva's beautiful Child and Companion or Sara McAulay's irreverently wonderful (In)Visibility. Reading those pieces, one will be compelled to read the rest.
What happens when menopause "coincides with a larger, more profound loss" (Marilyn Krysl)? Or when a woman's menopause takes place "just when her daughter enters adolescence" (S. Holly Stocking)? How does one confide her changing condition to a hostile, alienated mother (Ione)? "What kind of era is menopause ringing in" (Gloria Steinem)? And, when her process is fulfilled yet her body still yearns, does a woman dare say, passionately, to her sleeping partner, "Wake up. I am a postmenopausal woman--and I want you, want you bad" (Sue Walker)? These are the kinds of questions this book brings forth, the investigations of a woman's world it makes. Hot Flashes exposes the perceptions of fear, self-doubt, despair, wonder, loss, failure, frustration, emancipation and exultation, and it delivers the ultimate sense of peace and acceptance. Monifa A. Love, in First to Last says it well:
Who will say she felt fallow
voided
unchained
excused
capricious
jubilant?
Who will tell me she felt nothing
everything
the same?
Who will nod if I can speak
of babies lost
doors closed
regret?
Who will laugh at me
when I whisper
about escape
and breathe hard?
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