Perimenopause is not a gift, but it is a revelation.
BarcelonaAt the end of July, Salvador Macip, director of the UOC's Health Sciences Studies and professor of molecular medicine at the University of Leicester, wrote an article about his autism diagnosis at the age of 54. Macip explains that most autistic people develop compensation mechanisms to hide their autism, which is known as masking or camouflage: the effort to hide autistic traits and fit into the social norms that the environment dictates as "normal."
I've thought a lot about this concept while reading On all fours, the latest novel by the American writer Miranda July (published by Angle Editorial and translated by Bel Olid). Very polarized things have been said about this book: on the one hand, the New York Times and the New Yorker It was included among the best of 2024 and hailed as "the first great novel about perimenopause" or as "a gift from the gods that just needs to be unwrapped"; on the other hand, I've read people who call it "banal and superficial" and having a "special and at times unbearable" protagonist.
We women are tired of having to hide who we are.
In my opinion, it may not be a gift from the gods, but it can't be said to be a banal or superficial book. On the contrary, I've enjoyed it and recommended it to friends, because there aren't many novels starring women in their forties that talk about desire, masturbation, or perimenopause without taboos. In fact, another fantastic book from Angle Editorial is the volume that collects the three autobiographical books of Deborah Levy, in which she reviews her life from her divorce in her forties to her sixties and reflects on desire and romantic relationships at this stage of life, but where sex or perimenopause are absent.
Beyond hormonal changes or the infatuation of young men, the central theme that July explores, in a fun and somewhat surreal way, is the need to unmask oneself as a woman. And that's why it resonated so strongly with young women, and not just those of us who have already turned forty: because we're all tired of having to hide who we are to fit into the expectations and roles assigned to us in a patriarchal society.
I've heard middle-aged men talk more about menopause—in a demeaning way—than about when they should start taking Viagra. Maybe On all fours It's not a perfect novel, but it has the virtue of leopard print: it's sexy, but it's also good for older women, it's tidy and casual; an intergenerational cement that binds us together because we all carry the pressure of not being able to fully free ourselves for fear of losing the approval and love of those around us, especially the men who surround us.
Just as Macip speaks of the masking As a survival strategy for neurodivergence, July shows us how women spend half their lives camouflaging themselves. Perimenopause, my friends, isn't a gift from the gods, but it does have one virtue: it strips us bare and makes us lose our masks. And what lies beneath, like the novel's protagonist, we no longer want to hide.
