A WEEK BEFORE my forty-fourth birthday, I went to see my GP. I had by then been experiencing irregular periods for several years – my cycles were anything from two and half weeks to two months long. In the previous year or so, my insomnia had worsened, and I’d started getting hot flushes and night sweats. Because I was not yet forty-five, my doctor asked the pathologist to look at my fertility hormones. The results showed that while my ovaries were still producing oestradiol, the strongest form of oestrogen, my levels of follicle-stimulating hormone and luteinising hormone were high. These results indicated I was perimenopausal – I would likely go through menopause sometime in the next two years.

My doctor advised me to get my bone density checked and to take Vitamin D and calcium daily. She suggested antidepressants. She told me to expect weight gain and that I would likely have to change the way I dressed. We may have discussed menopausal hormone treatment (MHT), but she didn’t prescribe it. (As an aside, I’ve chosen to use the term MHT not HRT to move way from concept that oestrogen is something that’s ‘lost’ and therefore needs to be replaced. As Dr Jen Gunter says, this assumption is ‘patriarchal and ageist. Women do not become “less” due to menopause.’)

By then, the 2002 Women’s Health Institute (WHI) study results, which associated MHT with an increased breast cancer risk, had been debunked, but the spectre still lingered. In some ways, it still does. In her 2021 book, The Menopause Manifesto, Gunter writes: ‘It’s not possible to overstate the impact of WHI on how we view MHT today, and I suspect its reverberations will likely be felt for decades more.’

Over the next year, symptoms of perimenopause – hot flushes, insomnia, night sweats, joint aches and brain fog – would render my body increasingly alien to me. I was angry all the time, though the word ‘anger’ doesn’t quite capture it. I lived on painkillers, adrenaline, caffeine and too much alcohol, lurching from one apparent crisis to the next.

IN HER 2019 review of Darcey Steinke’s Flash Count Diary, Sarah Manguoso shares that – upon first experiencing perimenopause symptoms – she ‘combed the best-selling books about menopause for useful information and found nothing’. Manguoso’s review was titled ‘Where are all the books about menopause?’ Six and a half years later, this rhetorical question has been emphatically answered. Who isn’t having a hot flush right now? Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, Salma Hayek, Gillian Anderson, Naomi Watts – they’re all feeling it and spreading the word. On podcasts and TV, Instagram and TikTok, Substack and Reddit. The TikTok clip of Drew Barrymore’s on-air perimenopausal ‘hot flash’ from March 2023 has been viewed almost four million times.

In May 2025, forty-five-year-old Melani Sanders caught a glimpse of her reflection in her car’s rear-view mirror. She’d barely slept the night before; her hair was a mess and her bra didn’t fit properly. She took out her phone and started filming a video: ‘We about to start a perimenopause–menopause club okay, and it’s gonna be called the We Do Not Care Club.’ It blew up on social media – within weeks, she went from having a few hundred thousand to over a million followers across TikTok and Instagram. Her book, The Official We Do Not Care Club Handbook: A Guide for Women in Perimenopause, Menopause, and Beyond Who Are Over It, came out 13 January 2026.

One thing is clear: menopause is all the rage. British cultural historian Deborah Jermyn calls it ‘the menopausal turn’, of which ‘one of the most visible and thus seemingly lucrative arms has been the rise of celebrity menopause memoirs’. Recent and forthcoming Australian publications include Shelley Horton’s I’m Your Peri Godmother: A Happily-Ever-After Guide to Kicking Perimenopause in the Ovaries (July 2025), Michelle Bridges’ The Perimenopause Method: The Only Menopause Guide You’ll Ever Need (August 2025), Em Rusciano’s Blood, Sweat and Glitter (October 2025) and I’m Not Mad (Anymore) by comedian Bron Lewis (March 2026). These are in addition to The M Word: How to Thrive in Menopause by Dr Ginni Mansberg (2020), Queen Menopause: Finding Your Majesty in the Mayhem by Alison Daddo (2022), It’s the Menopause: What You Need to Know in Your 40s, 50s and Beyond by Kaz Cooke (2023), as well as two books by New York Times bestselling medico-influencers in 2024: The Menopause Brain by neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi, and The New Menopause by Dr Marie Claire Haver (who has a handy 2.3 million TikTok followers in addition to her four million followers on Instagram). Dr Haver’s next book, The New Perimenopause: An Evidence-Based Guide to Surviving the Zone of Chaos and Feeling Like Yourself Again, is coming out in April 2026. In many cases, these books are addenda to pre-existing platforms: wellness clinics, supplement lines, podcasts, fitness apps, skincare ranges and, above all, influential personal brands.

BRITISH-AUSTRALIAN ACTOR Naomi Watts has been publicly talking about menopause for years, first via her Instagram, then through Stripes Beauty, a brand she founded in 2022 ‘to address the various practical needs of women [her] age’. Now she’s sharing her ‘journey towards an age of joy, pleasure and meaning’ in Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known About Menopause (January 2025). Watts’ online persona is quirky, a bit daggy and appealingly real – or so it seemed when I started following her on Instagram a few years ago. Despite all the red-carpet twirls, the front-row seats at fashion shows and the slew of selfies with famous friends, she seemed relatable. I remember being curious about Stripes and feeling tempted to try the Vag of Honor hydrating gel, which wasn’t (and still isn’t) available in Australia. When Dare I Say It was released, I put myself on the waiting list at my local library.

Watts’ menopause origin story goes something like this: she was thirty-six and had just wrapped filming for King Kong. She and her husband at the time, actor Liev Schreiber, had been trying to conceive. After seeking fertility advice from her doctor, she was told she was close to menopause. As she writes in her introduction to Dare I Say It, she was stunned: ‘That’s for grandmothers! I’m not even a mother yet!’ Watts goes on to reveal she’d been having night sweats for a while and, in her mid-thirties, her periods had started to arrive more often, ‘sometimes every fifteen to eighteen days’. After talking these symptoms through with her doctor and her mother, she realised she was in perimenopause.

If there’s a common trope of the celebrity menopause memoir, it’s some variation of I knew nothing! I had no idea! Why didn’t anyone tell me about this? In her memoir, Michelle Bridges is sitting in her car, having just been prescribed antidepressants. It’s 2020, she’s forty-nine, and hasn’t considered she might be perimenopausal. ‘I think I was subconsciously in denial,’ she writes. ‘Menopause would mean I was ageing, and I wasn’t ready to acknowledge the fear I felt over what that might mean for me as a woman in the fitness industry.’ Her symptoms also coincided with a challenging period in her personal life: a recent separation and the subsequent transition to single parenthood. Until she began speaking to women’s health experts, she had no idea perimenopause ‘was a thing’.

There is a knowledge gap when it comes to information about both perimenopause and menopause, which over half the world’s population will experience at some point. This gap is even more pronounced when it comes to the experiences of Indigenous, BIPOC, LGBTQI+ and neurodivergent populations. As Wiradjuri author Anita Heiss comments (in Daddo’s Queen Menopause), ‘There’s so little research on Aboriginal women and menopause it isn’t worth mentioning.’

In 2025, a group of Aboriginal health researchers reviewed 114 Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations’ (ACCHO) websites and found that none of them had ‘dedicated resources or comprehensive information specifically about perimenopause or menopause’. As the authors noted, ‘Indigenous women face greater barriers to accessing culturally safe care, report more severe symptoms, and experience menopause at a younger age, all of which are compounded by the lasting effects of colonisation and the erosion of traditional knowledge systems.’ Recent research in the UK has shown that Black and Asian women are less likely to access MHT (5 per cent and 6 per cent respectively), compared to 23 per cent of white women. Karen Arthur, founder and host of the podcast Menopause Whilst Black, uses the term ‘racial weathering’ to describe the way in which chronic racial stress can affect long-term health.

The current wave of books about perimenopause seeks to fill this gap in some way. Popular topics include self-advocacy within the health system, as well as the safety and benefits of MHT (which include symptom relief as well as reduced risk of osteoporosis and heart disease). But what happens when we outsource health advice and advocacy to celebrities and influencers, many of whom have a vested financial interest?

Writing in The Conversation, Kate Pleace suggests celebrity activism could, in fact, be harmful: ‘Celebrities often have the financial resources to access private medical care, which can mean they receive medical care and treatment that those on average wages are unable to afford.’ They blurb each other’s books and collaborate in the name of building community. However, ‘the menoposse’ (as Marie Claire Haver calls her ‘tribe of like-minded physicians’ in the foreword to Dare I Say It) is not just spruiking the evidence-based benefits (and risks) of MHT. In many cases, it’s also shilling for testosterone, even though, as Dr Susan Davis pointed out in 2019, ‘there is currently no robust or consistent evidence that testosterone therapy will improve any symptoms for women other than low sexual desire after menopause.’ It’s little wonder that researchers in Australia and the UK have recently warned that the increased commercialisation of menopause is leading to misinformation.

Celebrity platforms are built on trust. When a celebrity author admits to us, ‘I’m not a doctor’, then goes on to tell us about whatever worked for them with evangelical zeal, we listen. When they speak to us in a calm or mildly unhinged yet reassuring voice, with self-deprecating humour or in an intimate whisper, when they name-drop experts and include footnotes, are we going to scrupulously fact check? No, not unless – like me – you’re writing an essay on the subject, in which case you might follow the breadcrumbs and discover that some of Shelley Horton’s footnotes lead back to Dr Louise Newsom’s website. Newsom’s British Menopause Society accreditation was revoked in late 2024 for prescribing hormones in higher-than-recommended doses. Her fall from grace is a reminder that it’s worth paying attention to who’s blurbing the influx of books…and where each footnote leads.

DEAR READER, IN case you’re wondering, I survived menopause. At fifty-three, I’m out the other side. My body and brain feel more or less like my own, and the night sweats – which for me were the most incapacitating of all my symptoms – are infrequent and relatively mild. My doctor prescribed me MHT one year after we first discussed perimenopause. I walked out of her office, prescription in hand, with an overwhelming sense of relief. I took oral MHT in varying doses for a little over a year before weaning myself off it. Would I have stayed on MHT longer, knowing what I know now? Maybe. I was only forty-six and still having the odd period. I was still feeling the heat. But I wasn’t dying. When people ask me whether MHT made a difference, my honest answer is ‘I’m not sure’. But it took the edge off while I implemented a few lifestyle changes that did have an effect: exercising more, drinking less, spending as much time in the ocean as I could.

MHT is not a one-size-fits-all solution, but I’m grateful it was an option for me. It was much cheaper and easier than everything else I tried – the acupuncture and Chinese herbs, the naturopath visits, the failed parasite cleanse, the herbal supplements. For most people, MHT is safer and more effective than the six-week hair restoration system (AUD$550) voted ‘Best Growth Serum’ at the 2025 Oprah Daily Menopause O-ward, the cooling wristband (AUD$678.97) voted ‘Best Wearable for Hot Flashes’, or any of the ever-growing number of Menopause^TM vitamins, serums, oils, moisturisers, supplements, gummies, lubes, vibrators, massagers and cooling products available now ‘to give you the relief you deserve’.

_{^{Image credit: Jocelyn Morales via Unsplash}}