Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life, by Darcey Steinke.
is a striking book that examines menopause in wide strokes. A book of creative nonfiction, she explores the natural world of mammals in the later years of their long lives: whales, elephants, gorillas, horses. She writes, "In turning to animals, I wanted to study a few female mammals in middle age, hoping they might be a conduit to what the philosopher William James in one of his lectures called, the "more.""

Female whales live thirty to fifty years after menopause and they are the matriarchal leaders of their family pods. She goes to Friday Harbor, goes kayaking to meet Granny, the grandmother whale who sadly died in her 90s. She goes to protest at SeaWorld in Florida for holding Lolita, at the time fifty years-young, and the second-oldest whale in captivity. She is a Southern Resident killer whale Latin name Orcinus orca. She exposes the conditions Lolita lives under, a small tank, not fed enough so she'll do tricks. The male whale battered his head against the walls till he died. She compares herself to Lolita: "I recognize the feeling of being held captive, not literally, like Lolita, but metaphorically. A female captivity always binding but that without fertility, tightens further. I am restricted, stuck in the box the greater culture uses to enclose and reduce older women. Lolita must be what Seaquarium defines, a creature who does not want to be free, a prisoner who must be grateful to her captors, a female who does tricks in order to be fed."

She travels to visit Ambika, a sixty-eight-year-old elephant at the National Zoo (Ambika was euthanasia in March 2020 at age 72). She was captured in 1959 at age eleven in India so lived 59 years in captivity. Elephant elder females also lead their family groups, their fertility slows but they do not lose their fertility, at the zoo they put Ambika on birth control. "In the wild, elephants as old as sixty have been known to give birth, after a gestation period that lasts twenty-two months, and most live six to twelve years after their last baby was born. Their post-reproductive life is short but rich. They not only lead the greater herd but also help their individual offspring. A recent study found that the older the matriarch, the longer her daughters lived and the higher their reproductive rates."

When horses are no longer able to breed they are often sold at action to slaughterhouses. "Broodmares are bred each year and, like Premarin mares, whose urine is used to make hormone supplements, are kept continuously pregnant,...." And yes, she discusses Premarin and the effort to keep women's vagina's pliable for men even though it was shown in the 1970s it is linked to uterine cancer. "In 2002, the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study was stopped early because conditions that hormones were supposed to decrease—uterine and breast cancer, strokes, heart disease-all increased slightly when woman took hormone replacements." She reviews book that advocated hormone therapy, "It wasn't so much the hormones, I eventually realized, as the tone. Each book is the literary equivalent of submissive dog offering its jugular to the more powerful species: man."

My summary is brief, this is an important book for women, including transgender women, to read and for men who care about the women in their lives. A critical quote near the end is from Germaine Greer, "The menopausal woman is the prisoner of a stereotype and will not be rescued from it until she has begun to tell her own story." And one from the philosopher Avital Ronell, "If feminism is anything it has to be a rigorous call for justice. As long as it excludes certain people, animals and even plants—it's not delivering on its promise." Powerful.

Note: More 3.5 than 3.

I wanted to read something about menopause, but not something staid, angry, or clinical. This book kept popping up in recommended menopause reading lists, so I ordered it. This is not the book you want if you are looking for physiological detail or deep sociological analysis. This is the book you want if you are looking for personal and meandering reflections on the experience of menopause. It gets bonus points for a fascinating narrative thread about orca (females also go through menopause), but be warned there is disturbing content about orca in captivity and declining populations in the Pacific Northwest.

Going through menopause 10 years early is a lonely endeavor, and this book felt like a well-researched, empathetic, articulate companion. Darcey describes a shift from being led by physical urges to spiritual urges, and that is reassuring. Not clinging to a youthful understanding of femininity is reassuring. Her association and care for the animal kingdom is prescient and deep. Highly recommended.

This title is extremely misleading. This book is minimally about menopause or hot flashes, and so as a woman trying to learn something about menopause and trying to mine the book for guideposts, I found this book a miserable experience.

Steinke spends a huge amount of time obsessing over whales, because she was heartened by the fact that the female of that species continues to live and be accepted in its community past reproduction. I kept wondering why she needed this validation, and then it came out - her mother was a miserable misogynist woman who hated her daughter and died a terrible, mysterious death (her corpse was discovered nude on the floor of her filthy house after days of neglect when her neighbors saw newspapers piling up, because her children apparently never checked in on their elderly mother).

Steinke felt that she could not look to older women for help, so she looked desperately at any other mammal whose females don't die or get killed upon the cessation of menstruation and alighted on whales. And she wastes so much time regurgitating, verbatim, the men who hated women most in the history of male thought (Freud, for example), because she really believed them. Rather than give serious consideration or quotes from WOMEN WHO HAVE ACTUALLY HAD MENOPAUSE, she quotes men and men and more men, but men who hate women, specifically. So odd.

Things I learned from this book:
She has hot flashes, and hates having them. Her second husband is a slob, and her first husband was the kind of asshole who took his wife to walk the streets of a red light district in a foreign country and then get all turned on and have sex with his wife - for free- in their hotel room. Great. She also really dislikes the idea of hormonal treatments or any other thing that isn't natural but doesn't really try to understand or explain the science. She's fixated on the fact that one medication is derived from the urine of horses and I don't know if she does this research for other medications which are lifesaving which are the direct result of animal testing (i.e. insulin). I wonder if this is because she just really hates being a woman - the idea of putting in things specifically called 'female' anything (hormones, in this case) into her body is repugnant to her. Steinke thinks that a 'wet' pussy is a 'docile' pussy which is a really strange idea (but then, this book came out well before W.A.P).

I was hoping for a book about what it's like to experience menopause, but this woman spends half of it mourning over the fate of killer whales in captivity and anthropomorphizing those animals, and the rest of it struggling against the self-hating misogyny she got from her mother, and failing to overcome it. Very dreary.

If Steinke was my only source, I'd have to conclude that white womanhood is extraordinarily miserable, because you spend half of it desperately worried you're not sexy enough, and then the second half desperately mourning whatever sex appeal you previously had. So I feel sorry for Steinke, truly, for all her miserable experiences, but what I am hopeful for is that since I have always loved being a girl, and getting my period as a teen made me feel powerful and magical, and I currently also don't hate myself, I will have a much more pleasant menopause.

A difficult but necessary read!

I rarely don't finish a book that I don't like. But there comes a point where it is just awful enough that I can't stand to read anymore. This was this book.

First off I read to page 116, about halfway through. They were five f-bombs at that point. It's all about menopause, so there's a part where she talks about how people going through menopause are neither man nor woman with their sex. I completely disagree because I feel gender is eternal, and we don't get to just pick what we are no matter what our hormones are doing. She also gets to a point where she basically says that because of our hormones during menopause we have the right to feel rage and be angry. I feel like anger is a choice, and we can control that if we choose to. Nothing should force us to be angry. And the last thing that broke the camel's back was her describing a naked man coming into their "massage parlor" and an orgy. Didn't stick around to figure out the point of that. It probably had to deal with the fact of her sex drive decreasing with menopause.

So didn't finish, no official rating, but if I did it would be a 1. Read because it was on the Bloody Buddy's bookclub list.

2.5
I didn't like the style of the book and really way too much about whales

I really wanted to like this book. It's hard to find anything written about menopause that's not some medical book about hormone replacement. I really just wanted to read a memoir by another woman who was struggling like me. Darcey is definitely struggling, and I respect her for putting her thoughts down on paper. She had many thoughts that resonated with me, like how our culture devalues older women, how body changes are hard to adjust to, the weirdness and discomfort of hot flashing all the time, etc. But Darcey is a little more intellectual than me, and some of her writing was a little over my head. And I really couldn't relate too much to the whole tangent with the whales. I understand where she's coming from in admiring whales because older females are leaders in their pod, but I just wasn't into all the whale stuff that much. So as much as I want to support and encourage Darcey in her own struggle to come to terms with menopause, I didn't relate to a good bit of what she says here.

No great revelations here, although I did find the sections about the whales fascinating, but how wonderful to find someone out there that’s feeling a lot like me. This passage, in particular, blew me away:

“As I moved through menopause I often felt death stalking me, just behind my shoulder like a particularly belligerent ghost. Rather than push death away, as I had for years, I was forced to learn to live with her, to accept my body’s limitations, accept that the earth’s cycle played out not only in the outer world but also inside me. Call it decay or change, I am, like everything else in nature, recyclable.”

Recommended reading for any woman making this passage.