With 'Dare I Say It,' Naomi Watts aims to help menopausal women feel less alone

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4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

At age 36, actor Naomi Watts visited her doctor in hopes of starting a family. Instead, she was told that she was close to menopause. She says she felt panicked and alone, despite the fact that tens of millions of women experience menopause each year. In a new book, Dare I Say It, Watts tries to open what she sees as a closed conversation around aging. Her advice-based book covers her own fertility story, her experience with menopause symptoms, skincare, nutrition and more. In today's episode, Watts speaks with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly about learning to be her own advocate at the doctor's office, hormone replacement therapy, and returning to herself in this new chapter of life.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. When it comes to advocating for yourself
0:07.4	at the doctor's office, it's a lot easier said than done, right? And it can be confounding if
0:13.5	your body is telling you one thing and your doctor is telling you another. And this is especially
0:19.9	true for women going through menopause.
0:22.0	Even the super famous actor Naomi Watts had to learn this skill of speaking up for herself at the
0:28.1	doctor as her body was changing. And she put everything she learned into a new book called
0:33.2	Dare I Say It, Everything I Wish I'd Known About Menopause. In this interview with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, Watts talks about how alone she felt going through menopause, even though it's something tens of millions of women experience every year. That's coming up.
0:50.6	In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.
0:55.5	Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, Sources and Methods.
1:02.0	NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.
1:09.6	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever
1:12.4	you get your podcasts. The actor Naomi Watts tells a story about a doctor's appointment. At the time
1:19.1	she had just finished filming King Kong, she wanted to have a baby and she was having trouble
1:24.6	getting pregnant. But the doctor examined her and pronounced,
1:28.8	looks like you're close to menopause. Watts was 36 years old. She almost fell off the exam table.
1:35.8	Naomi Watts writes about that moment in her new book, Dare I Say It, Everything I Wish I'd
1:41.1	Known about menopause. Naomi Watts, welcome. Thank you, Mary Louise.
1:46.4	Good to be here. Why did you almost fall off the exam table that day? I think I was just
1:52.5	shocked. Here I was wanting to begin a new chapter of my life, and I was slammed with this news of,
2:00.0	well, actually, you're close to the end.
2:02.7	And it's really young, 36. It must have felt so young. Yes. I was obviously later than my mom
2:08.9	coming to the world of parenting, but I still felt pretty young, certainly by standards that
	...

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