A <em>Moby-Dick</em>–Inspired Memoir of Menopause
By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.
In her new memoir, Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life, the author Darcey Steinke renders menopause as “a rupture, a metamorphosis, an all-encompassing and violent change.” Its physical intensity makes the experience so fearsome and bewildering, she writes; but equally disorienting is the lack of adequate cultural narratives devoted to making sense of it.
In a conversation for this series, Steinke explained how she turned to the animal kingdom for guidance when the world of human culture wouldn’t suffice. Her search for a menopausal role model brought her not to a writer or filmmaker, but to killer whales: a highly social, matriarchal species in which the females also go through menopause. Steinke followed her newfound obsession first to the Miami aquarium, where an orca named Lolita lives in captivity, and then to a kayak trip in search of Granny, a whale swimming wild in Canada’s Salish Sea. The whales’
