Dana Spiotta on putting paid to menopause shame

The Shift with Sam Baker

Sam Baker Ltd

Society & Culture, Health & Fitness, Personal Journals

4.8 • 525 Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2022

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When was the last time you read a book where the central character was not just perimenopausal but also talked and thought about menopause and its impact on her life. And she wasn’t a laughing stock? I’m prepared to bet never. That was the driving force for my guest this week, novelist Dana Spiotta. What if, she asked herself, the lead characters of some of her favourite books had had a hot flush? Think Mrs Dalloway on HRT. The resulting novel, Wayward, is the story of 53 year old Sam who, in the midst of the chaos and perverse clarity of perimenopause falls in love with a rundown house, buys it and leaves her husband, teenage daughter and the suburban security of married life in pursuit of a new her. Wayward is a blast of fresh air; funny, furious and extremely close to home! Dana joined me from her home in Syracuse, upstate New York, to talk about accidentally writing a “menopause novel”, how her own perimenopause informed her characters (cue, rage, insomnia and midlife misogyny), what happens when menopause and puberty collide and why people are still grossed out by the truth about female bodies. • You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at Bookshop.org, including Wayward by Dana Spiotta and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me! • The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Emily Sandford. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Jamie Lang and Sophie Haboo have arrived on Disney Plus.
0:04.5	We're having a baby.
0:05.5	We're having a baby.
0:07.2	I've always wanted to be mom.
0:09.4	And we're bringing you on our journey through everything.
0:12.4	I have no idea what we're doing.
0:13.6	Thank you. I have more of an idea.
0:15.6	I think of it like a Tamagocchi.
0:17.8	At the end of all of this...
0:20.0	We're going to have a little baby. Raising Chelsea, a Hulu
0:23.7	original series streaming exclusively on Disney Plus. 18 plus subscription required T's and T supply.
0:34.8	Hello and welcome to The Shift, the podcast that aims to tell the no-holds-bar truth about being a woman post-40, created and hosted by me, journalist and author, Sam Baker.
0:44.7	When was the last time you read a book where the central character was not just perimenopausal, but also talked and thought about menopause and its impact on her life?
0:53.6	That was the driving force for my guest this week, Dana Spiotta.
0:57.3	What if, she asked herself, the lead characters of some of her favourite books had had a hot flush.
1:02.9	The resulting novel, Wayward, is the story of 53-year-old Sam, who, in the midst of the chaos and perverse clarity of menopause, falls in love with a
1:11.5	rundown house, buys it and leaves her husband, teenage daughter, and the suburban security
1:16.8	of married life in pursuit of a new her.
1:19.6	There's something about being middle-aged that allows a kind of humility that I think is good
1:24.7	and sort of maybe even gets to this kind of acceptance of some of these
1:28.9	mortal things about your finiteness of your life and how you as an individual have only so much
1:34.0	time and maybe that's okay.
	...

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