Writer & Columnist • Santa Barbara, CA
Looking back, I probably should have lied. It would have been more cordial. The woman was only making conversation, after all — not looking to meet my demons.
“Do you enjoy writing?” the nice mother asked me at back-to-school night last week as we both folded our overtall, underbendy bodies into the high school English class desks.
“Oh, yes,” I should have replied warmly. “Very much. Of course. More than anything. Who doesn’t?”
There’s a delicious moment in Sandra Tsing Loh’s new menopausal memoir when she sinks into a hot bath to read Anna Quindlen’s menopausal memoir Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake. For an instant, I believe that two of my favorite nonfiction writers are going to melt together into a smart, steamy, sisterhoody, say-what-we’re-all-thinking sort of soup.
But the soak only made Loh — divorced, sleepless, bloated, and at the frayed, thready end of her tightly wound rope — feel like “a hideous monster failure” compared to the “warm, sensible” and alcohol-abstaining Quindlen, who is still married to her high school sweetheart.
And what Loh wrote next was even better than sassy-scribe stew: “Anna Quindlen is a judgmental beeyotch masquerading as a nice person, and I hate her. I realize this puts me in the can’t-win position of attacking a clearly very nice and successful person … But if only we could see women crash around a bit more, particularly in middle age.”
Plenty of such crashing can be seen in Loh’s new book, The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones, a startlingly, refreshingly honest account of life as a modern woman being dragged — writhing and wailing — out of her forties. A writer and radio commentator who is coming to UCSB’s Campbell Hall in May, Loh describes her imperfect relationships with her lover, ailing father, adolescent daughters, and irritating therapist and her failure to cope gracefully with the weight gain, hot flashes, forgetfulness, and panic attacks of perimenopause.
I always knew I’d speak at my father’s funeral.
It’s a morbid thought, I know. But I was sure I’d deliver his eulogy. See, he’s a fascinating man — passionate and charismatic, the kind of guy who seems to have lived several lives in the space of one. A dozen careers. Hundreds of adventures. Thousands of friends.
And my father taught me how to write. By turning me on to cunning authors and forcing me to rewrite shoddy school essays, he helped shape my voice. We share a love of style, an ear for rhythm.
So I assumed that when the time came, I’d need to squelch my own sadness, stifle my tears, and sum up the substantial capacity of this man’s character. The notion scared me half to death myself. I spent years wondering what I’d say to honor such a life and whether I could do it justice.
But I don’t wonder that anymore. Now I just wonder if anyone will tell me when he dies.
Technically, he’s not my dad; he’s my stepdad. But he was a real father to me for 30 years. He coached me in table manners and protected me from bullies. He donned a grass skirt to man the grill for my Sweet 16 backyard luau. He wrote a poem for me and read it aloud at my wedding.
That day — the day I got married — he was already one year into a secret love affair with a woman who was not my mother. The liaison lasted 12 years before Mom discovered it.
