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The Second Half of Life
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10894 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1993 |
1,736 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
THE SILENT PASSAGE
Gail Sheehy
New York: Random House, 1992
161pp., $16.00
THE CHANGE
Germaine Greer
New York: Knopf, 1992
411pp., $24.00
What a generation we baby boomers are. Our self-obsessed sights have been trained on each stage of life, as if it had never been experienced before. Dissecting, analyzing, redefining, this exaggerated focus, brought on in part by our sheer numbers, repeatedly has brought about new ways of seeing and participating in the most common of human experiences that define us as individuals and a society. First there was self-actualization, then relationships, marriage, parenting, and now menopause.
Like the numerous parenting books that proliferated a decade ago, a rash of recent publications have attempted to demystify menopause. Two destined to become the most influential in putting "the change" on the public agenda (judging from sales to date) are Germaine Greer's The Change and Gail Sheehy's Silent Passage. One has only to put the books side by side to anticipate their differences: Greer's weighs in at 422 pages, a good length for a historical novel; Sheehy's 161-page volume is more epistle than book. "This is a hefty, unwieldy subject," Greer seems to announce, while Sheehy's fit in your hand book suggests manageability, coping, a "read this and you'll be fine" attitude. Greer's is a case of too much; Sheehy's one of too little. But for readers tottering on the brink of middle age, hungry for demystification and facts, Sheehy is the author to choose.
The press has made much of Sheehy's casting menopause as the last taboo, but when I began to mention my reading to friends and acquaintances, their responses were incredibly similar to those note by Sheehy. "Menopause?" one forty-seven year old said incredulously. "Oh!, no. I don't know a thing about it. I don't need to know anything about it yet." Another, rummaging through her gym bag for a forgotten pair of aerobic shoes, fretted about her deteriorating memory. When I mentioned that perhaps she was perimenopausal, she snapped, "I can't be perimenopausal. I just finished breast-feeding a year ago."
Then I recalled the friend who at fifty suddenly was experiencing heart
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