Interview - Jessica Hamilton and The Woods

Okay.

We can't discuss your book without discussing menopause because Alice is perimenopausal and she, Throughout the book, I was frustrated on the part of Alice for how sometimes what she was experiencing was pushed aside as being just a symptom of menopause.

Why did you make Alice menopausal or perimenopausal?

Well, I just, I mean, I'm, I'm of that age too.

I'm 51.

And I noticed over the last couple of years that, uh, any, and this was even with, with women, not, not specifically with men, but anything I said I was experiencing, um, I was told by other women, that's perimenopause.

So like everything, everything I was experiencing was sort of given that category of being perimenopause.

And I think it's great that in our society, we now talk about it more than it was, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago.

And that it's a more common thing and women are claiming it.

And I think that's a really positive, great thing.

And I think it's great women talk about it openly.

But I think that it's the case with anything with women, that it then gets taken and used against us.

So, you know, it's the same with like, oh, you must be on your period.

You know, you're acting this way or, oh, she's pregnant.

So she's not, you know, herself or, you know, that sort of thing.

It's the same with with perimenopause that it women's.

feelings can be excused away with it or their actions or in Alice's case when she believes things are happening that are are you know not safe for her family and she's getting paranoid and they're all just dismissed away as oh she's just it's just her perimenopause and I think that's just a reality women face at every stage in life for for different reasons and Um, and, and menopause has become that, I think it's a little bit more, um, you know, public now, but it's become, it's become that as well.

And even, like I said, even women do it to each other, you know, I, in the book, I have her.

Alice's friends sort of do the same thing.

And so it's just, it just seems to be in the climate right now for us.

And I think we have to be careful of that as women and, and, and as women against other, you know, against men doing it to us or doctors doing it to us, we have to, we have to keep that in check.

Yeah.

Cause one of your quotes, when Alice was having a discussion with her husband, she thought, No, you're gaslighting me and weaponizing a natural stage of life.

And I really like that phrase, the weaponizing.

Yeah.