Kate Muir Bridges The Hormone Gap

0:01This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:11Well behaved women rarely make history. Bloody difficult women do.

0:24Full disclosure, I was actually dreading doing a session on the menopause, but Kate Muir's book, How to Have a Magnificent Midlife Crisis, is cracking. So is she. And she's given me a great new beauty tip, which is that you can put collagen on your fanny as well as your face. Welcome to Difficult Women.

1:04Kate Muir, I was just going to say Kate Muir is Glaswegian because I sort of think it tells you so much already. You're also a writer and a documentarian. Your newest book, How to Have a Magnificent Midlife Crisis, is out today. So many congratulations, Kate. It follows on from other books in that area but also three novels and before you turned your you reinvented yourself to be a sort of public health expert on on all of these I can't bear to say this women's issues you've written about the pill as well you were the times television critic you were married also to the times's star essayist Ben McIntyre who's kind of about to become Dominic Sandbrook I suspect and the book is fascinating i have to say that the menopause is is not a subject that i i sort of cleave to because i think it's something that doesn't happen i thought it was terribly boring until i read your book so tell us about the genesis of your middle life crisis which has turned into this book so basically there was a point at which I was a kind of super tanker heading into kind of my late 40s.

2:23And I had three kids and a mum with Alzheimer's and a full time job as the film critic at The Times and try to be a nice couple about London, all that kind of thing. And I imploded. I literally didn't have the strength to keep going on doing that. and my marriage fell apart, my job fell apart. Not really to do with me the job, more to do with the people I was working for. And I was, you know, sort of crash test dummy in my own life. But obviously, in a sense, we are so resilient and I thought, right, I'm going to get on with it. I'm going to sort it out. You know, we don't complain. We're Glasgow Presbyterians.

3:08We get on with things and we have a work ethic. and it really took this huge crash and almost jumping off my own super tanker that I realised that I needed a bit of work. On yourself. On myself. I needed a bit of self-compassion, of which I had almost none. No, we're trained not to have that. And I kind of needed 18 months of therapy, which I had from an incredibly radical feminist psychotherapist. and once I'd sort of thrown everything out of the pram I felt incredibly bare and quite lost and at the same time my menopause which was a big menopause as opposed to some other people's cute little menopauses obviously it arrived and it knocked me over and I lost my memory and that was quite a big thing for me that I was a film critic reviewing 350 films a year for the times and I would start thinking, wait a minute, is that the director?

4:08Is that the director? I'd be on stage speaking. And I always got over it, but I was at home one day writing a shopping list and I thought, must shave my legs. And I wrote down the word shaver. And I thought, there's definitely another word for that thing in the bathroom. And 15 minutes later, I remembered the word razor. And at that point, I thought I had Alzheimer's because my mum had just died of Alzheimer's. And so I rang all my mates. our sort of generation of mates and many of them said to me oh it's fine don't worry we're all privately on HRT we've got this doctor's line here you go I went on got on HRT and of course my memory came back within a week and I'd had heart palpitations in the middle of the night all the time heart palpitations went away I suddenly thought this is a complete miracle that I thought I was kind of falling apart completely and also I think part of my divorce and fallout and mental health problems were to do with the depressive lack of oestrogen in my brain.

5:08So I thought, that's really interesting. I didn't clock that. I want to tell other people about this. And I also felt literally I'd experienced a sort of miracle by getting hormone replacement therapy. And it made such a huge difference to me and the way I performed and the way I was thinking. And I was incredibly angry of course that this wasn't out there everyone in the world wasn't talking about it and the word perimenopause was not at that point even on the NHS website so that was it I went to war on that subject you see because we're roughly the same age and I've been aware of HRT since my 20s and I've done bioidentical I'm now on you know Sandrina I'm now on everything and most women I know are.

6:01It's never been a dirty little secret. But for you, obviously, it was and you didn't know about it and it turned out that what you were going through was your endocrine system was crashing, wasn't it? The book, you know, I promised myself I'd never read another book about the menopause but I did read yours today and it's a lot more than a book about the menopause. It covers everything And everything, anything and everything from sort of hormonal, the hormonal war, this whole emotional storms you go through, all those life changes, reinvention, mind, body and spirit, I think, you know, that's how you divide it up.

6:44But I think I'm not sure you're entirely honest in the book about one thing. And this is what I want to ask you about. there's a passage where you said this was the book I wish I'd read in my 40s before I fucked up that's the first line it's a great first line Kate and then you you then talk about yourself as a this stealth bomber and you had lots of midlife crises but you said yours was within a couple of years I left my home and marriage that's it that's big you know that's big when we've all got sort of settled supposedly perfect marriages careers and children had an affair with a married man got divorced lost my memory lost my job and lost my mother to alzheimer's also the dog died after a tick bite and i remember reading that bit and thinking how did you recover from the dog dying

7:50To what extent was all of this, was it about falling in love and losing your kind of compass as well? No, that was part of the story. But I, you know, I didn't stay with the person I had an affair with and it was a passing thing. So that wasn't it. That was a catalyst in many kind of catalysts. so I don't think it was that there was something huge coming up from within me and I think a lot of it was about class and the things I'd kind of put away coming down from Glasgow to London which my generation of people who came from Scotland often did and you know the kind of sort of Oxford Cambridge elite that one moved among I have to say and you know them well you know you were expected to be a certain sort of person and a gloss a level of gloss not be aggressively political except in a witty way and perhaps have a very smooth and lovely you know make your life look good and I didn't I didn't think about it at the time but I discovered when I had this crash that there was the real smaller sized me wanting to come out and it really wanted to be completely honest about everything and it didn't want to be polite anymore.

9:22And that was, it was just such a joyful thing to find that person who'd probably been there in my early 20s but I'd, you know, I'd fitted myself around the world I worked in particularly the Times which was a certain kind of newspaper and, you know, I loved it and I loved being a film critic and all those things. But I realised there was a bit of me, and this is like Jung finding your shadow at a certain point in midlife. And I met my shadow and I was going, hello, I'm really pleased to see you again. So it was a, you know, and that is why the book is about everything. It's about spiritual things, about digital things, about a psilocybin trip.

10:05It's about, you know, how do you maintain your relationship as a couple? You know, does it need a bit of engineering at a certain point? as well as the hormones and all those other things. So that is why I poured this kind of soup into the book. And I feel that people can go through it and take the chapter they want first, basically, and not have to read all the hormone bit if they don't want to read that. Although I think that's incredibly significant. Because you do the work, you're a journalist, and you go through the science of the brain, the science of the hormones, all of that in the way that you also analyse the effects of these, the fat jabs on people too.

10:43You approach things in a very analytical way. This isn't woo-woo at all. This is more science, but shot through the filter of your own midlife crisis, which you now think was magnificent. Well, I don't necessarily think mine was magnificent. I think it was very good for me. I want other people to have magnificent midlife crisis. I'm not proud of having to leave my family and then join it all together again. And, you know, what you do to your children. And it is really, really tough, all that. So I'm not minimising that. But I wanted, you know, I was quite sick of the menopause narrative, in a sense, being always negative and people always being sad.

11:26And it was really important to bring it up and say, use this time positively. Take this moment. And the big thing for me in this time has also been understanding how your brain rewires. And the science has just come out in the last couple of years. And basically, your grey matter goes down in menopause. Just as it goes down, it changes in puberty and pregnancy and perimenopause. We have three brain rewirings as women if we have kids. And those are huge changes. and when the grey matter goes down that is when you start putting your cat in the washing machine and your car keys in the fridge and all those jokey things that everybody talks about but you have that memory loss and you do change your white matter the kind of motorways between bits of your brain you know it gets blocked a bit and that goes down as well if you're taking HRT obviously quite a lot of that comes back do we know from brain scans exactly what comes back I don't know but some of us have worse hormonal crashes than others.

12:29And, you know, I'm really, really interested in the mental health aspect of this rewiring, but also that, wow, when oestrogen and progesterone are loving, soft, mummy, calm, sleeping hormones disappear, what are we left when we are raw and kind of burnt to the bone? And there is that kind of moment where you come back and you either, you know become a witch or a crown or you decide you're going to enter politics or whatever it is but you come back a different person and sometimes your relationship no longer fits the person that you are at that point um so it's a far greater thing than the male midlife crisis which is you know perhaps more of a spiritual menopause as my partner said to me the other day um and um But, you know, you mean the man getting a red Ferrari test roster and running off with a woman 20 years younger?

13:24All the kind of, oh, my God, I'm going to die moment when they start looking in that direction. For us, you know, losing fertility, looking in the direction of death, parents dying, you know, children leaving home and the business of I hate the word empty nest. It makes me so angry. It just seems so naff. And so, you know, the idea that the nest empties, you must also leave the nest in some kind of way. at the same time or you know you know what are you going to do and I think that I'm really interested in kind of pushing women to be radical from the kind of age of 50 to 75 just getting out there and and doing stuff with their new brains their new brains I feel really inspired okay what should I do should I you're doing what should I do but I think it's also important to to shift the focus from the woman of course you know you're searching for the for the heroin inside yourself and all that after menopause but i think it's important that the whole family alters to accommodate that person who is the caring hormones have left the building you literally don't care where the trainers are if somebody says they've lost their keys it's their problem the whole business of everybody making their problems your problem has has to come to an end and i think in our my 50s has been my best decade by far because i have no fucks left to give isn't that what it's about as well and and your family members and your loved ones and your friends also getting to that point yeah and if they're adaptable that is fantastic and actually i have a new relationship with my three kids which is much much more equal than it was before and we help one another in different ways and we are much much more honest with one another so i'm really really happy that that has has happened over time but you're pre-grandchildren aren't you so am i so do you think we're going to be like the the hand is going to come up the fatal whatever it is and yank us back down into domesticity and servitude um probably not let's just say but the other thing i was thinking about about that time is there's a woman called aviva wittenberg cox who's written about the four quarter life and she's looking into people working later in life and she says you should think of your life as being 100 years long if we're lucky and that's 25 years is growing and the second 25 years from 25 to 50 is achieving and between 50 and 75 is becoming so we are becoming what we are becoming we have no idea and then 75 to 100 is harvesting this is madness i'm not at all becoming anymore when i look at old photos I think it's what's harvesting.

16:21I've no idea what harvesting is, but I love the becoming. And I like the idea of us because, you know, we've got to work till we're 67. If you're in a, you know, waiting for a state pension or whatever, we have to use this time. And I also keep thinking about politics when I see 78 year old men running large countries. and I think where are my wise 78 year old women who have run families, who've run businesses, who've run the FTSE 100, why are they not there? They're not even on television, Kate. Why is our generation of geniuses largely missing? And I'm sure we will all rise up and keep talking and fighting but I do feel there's this great big empty hill and I know it's like one, you know, there are 10 women CEOs in the FTSE 100 You know, it is worse in Europe.

17:14And, you know, we are seeing a kind of Susan Faludi style backlash against women from America, aren't we? You know, and so when we're in a backlash, I do think the wise women in their becoming stage of life will really matter. So although I don't go on about politics really at all in the book, that's sort of what's bubbling under in my psyche. Well, you're absolutely right to flag the absence of women at the top. I mean, that's remained constant. Also, the misapprehension that as soon as there are 30 % women in any institution, they are overrepresented. You quote the Fawcett Society figures about women leaving during menopause.

17:55Yeah, it's one in 10. And that was women aged 45 to 55. And that was a poll of 4000 women across the UK and a completely diverse poll. So it's very good. It's not just the people moaning about menopause on Instagram. These were real people. And I just see it all the time. And people write to me all the time and say, you know, and actually in the book, I've got a couple of women who signed NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, who basically had kind of health problems, midlife. health problems and they were just performance managed right out of their jobs and not given promotion and you know like many people took a big payoff walked away realized what was wrong with their health realized what was going on with menopause sorted themselves out looked back at the job market boom it had passed on you know um and so there's that kind of um silent disappearance of about 10%, 20 % of women and people not going for promotion and people going part-time and also people deciding to take their pension and do their gardening.

18:59But, you know, if I was doing gardening for the next 40 years, I'd shoot myself. Roses and grandchildren. But in the old days, that's what we were expected to do in our 60s. Yeah. Whereas men were expected to carry on, like picking up women, becoming president, you know, all the rest of it, you know, uninterruptedly until they, you know, they were, you know, turned into Joe Biden. anyway it is still fun, there is still a huge gender sexism age gap of course and I'm glad that you have that section about NDAs in the book I think they're pernicious too

19:51You also write about sexual invisibility, but you've sort of punched through that because you point out that you actually don't write about all these endless movies and books about older women and younger men, which I think is a terrible old cliche. But you recognise that there's a moment where a man sees the post-menopausal woman and knows that he can't impregnate her. But there's something beyond that. What would you like to say about that? Well, I mean, it is absolutely true that men's testosterone rises when they're in a room with a fertile woman, whoever they are. And there is that. And I also remember once being at Cannes and Woody Allen was still on the stage then.

20:32And I was in the press conference and I asked him about the particular film he had on, which was, you know, obviously older man, younger woman, typical Woody Allen film. And I said, what if it was the other way around, Woody? And he said, oh, that might be quite funny. It could be a comedy. like you like he couldn't conceive that there would be a 20 year age gap or 30 year age gap going in the other direction you're just like flummoxed by the idea no loads of films yeah yeah of course now it's it's changed so talking about sex i think a lot of people in this generation maybe aren't loose-limbed enough about sex in lots of ways so one of the things i talked about was Killing Kittens, which is a fantastic kind of swinging organisation, which is rather good fun, which is women-led.

21:23So you've got to have kind of your driving lives as a proof who you are. You join as a woman. It's a kind of safe space. And you can bring another woman along or another man along, but men don't join by themselves. So there's not a chance of this sort of, it's really not a predatory thing it's a very different atmosphere and um so i interviewed emma sale who runs killing kittens who's very funny um just about that and women going and you know having sex for the night and coming home and having sex with women and having sex with men and you know whatever and you know we just haven't kind of got into quite that stage certainly the women i talk to in, you know, menopause world.

22:04And so many people come up to me quietly after I give talks and they go, it's absolute agony having sex. I would really like to continue to have sex with my husband, but I can only manage it once a month because it's like being stabbed. And I go, you just need vaginal estrogen. Here you go. You can get it on the NHS. We put all this collagen on our faces. We put Chanel on our faces. Why are we not putting Chanel or our fannies and we absolutely should keep them plump and filled with collagen and if you're on HRT it's probably not so bad but it helps even more and so things like that you know I've just helped quite a few people who weren't having sex to have sex again which is probably my greatest contribution to society so far.

22:46It's inspiration. I've got to ask did you go to a killing kittens Kate? I didn't. Oh come on you can tell me this is difficult women. No but I'm afraid I interviewed them about it, but I didn't go because I was very much in love with my new partner, who's my new husband now. Oh, you're married to Cameron. I married Cameron and we didn't want to have a big wedding. So we eloped to New York in November and got married in City Hall. And it was$25 for the certificate. I think$35 for the three minute ceremony. Cheat date. And then Chinatown, dim sum. Perfect. My kind of wedding. Were the kids there or not?

23:26My daughter was there because she lives in New York and we needed an American witness, so she came and was our American witness. Oh, well, congratulations. And is Cameron from Glasgow as well? Of course, yeah. So you really have gone back to your inner core, your roots. Well, he also, he was in my law class when I was 17 at Glasgow University. Oh, my God, he's an old flame. No, no, no, no. I had a couple of coffees with him. Okay, but you know what I mean. An old friend, a very old friend. I met him again on Guardian Soulmates when that still existed. Do you remember Guardian Soulmates? Of course I did.

23:56Yes, lots of people were on there. We just met the same people all the time. Everyone was dating the same people. I don't know why they binned it. It was fantastic because you could write essays about yourself. You all read The Guardian as well. You knew exactly what you were getting. So, yeah, we met just because you said, I recognise you. You were in my law class. My jaw literally just dropped. Do you realise that? By the way, this is all being filmed. We've got to the point in the podcast, Kate, where I ask you about your most difficult time. And you can choose whether you want to take that literally or a time you've been had to be most difficult.

24:32I sort of prefer the former because I get better stories out. Well, I suppose, aside from what we've already talked about, which is getting divorced and, you know, dealing with that. My most difficult time was making the two menopause documentaries. With Davina McCall. With Davina McCall. That's not to do with Davina McColl. That is to do with the upturning kind of the menopause narrative in Britain. And it was horrible. And it was just so hard to prove to the Channel 4 lawyers and everyone we spoke to that, you know, the new version of the menopause was real. We weren't making it up. The science was there.

25:11The science papers were there and everyone was terrified. it was like we were bringing people crystal meth every time we mentioned HRT on the TV. And obviously there was a sort of elite in London who knew all the stuff about HRT, but around the country that it was just literally unknown and about, you know, a tiny percentage of women were on HRT. Now a million more women are on HRT in the UK than there were before this kind of tsunami of menopause conversation in the last couple of years. But I just remember making those documentaries and being desperate to get this message out and get it right and researching it and researching it all the way through lockdown.

25:50It kept getting rejected, the documentary. And then we got there, we were making it, and every single day I thought, oh my God, I've got something wrong with my stomach. I felt like there was this huge knot inside me. And then when the documentary aired, I was about to go to the doctor to say there's something terribly wrong with me. I was absolutely fine. because I was so invested in this thing and trying to make it as good as I could. And you can never make them. You know what it's like making a documentary. You can never make them perfectly. And I'd been so used to controlling the narrative in the way I wrote.

26:27And, you know, having lots of people involved in a project, it was really, really hard. But it did its task and it changed the narrative in Britain. And I've actually sort of changed the narrative in America too, now in Australia. and you know there were these amazing powerful wonderful forward-thinking pioneering doctors like Dr Louise Newsome who's had a really hard time because she is just a super pioneer and an amazing thinker on all this and you know people the medical establishment the fatberg of the medical establishment hated what we were doing and hated the idea that women would get informed through Instagram and through a documentary and not through their GP.

27:12And your GP doesn't have time to study the science of hormones. You know, it's not surprising they didn't know everything. And so that was an enormous struggle. I was really, really glad when that was over. But it was very much worth it. And I know they were nominated for endless BAFTAs and so on. And you probably won awards for them too. Kate, I'm looking at the time anxiously And we could go on talking for ages. I haven't really managed to cover your novels, which are Left Bank, The West Coast, and Suffragette City, on top of your other books. Congratulations on your productivity and your powers of reinvention.

27:54Kate Muir, thank you very much for being this week's Difficult Woman. Thank you.

28:07I love Kate's expression of not being able to turn the supertank around, so she just jumped off. I'm going to hold that close to my heart. If that went down well, why don't you, if you haven't already, that is to have another listen to my interview with Kathy Lett, the comic novelist. Thank you. Thank you very much for listening to another episode of my Difficult Women podcast. Just remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to make sure the latest episode is ready to go every Monday afternoon. Bye.