The Postmenopausal Novel

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in Paris, 1935.

There are few books for those of us on the other side of fertility. There’s a whole literary genre, the coming-of-age novel, that details with wonder and reverence the moment in which girls become sexual, and yet both male and female writers have been reluctant to take on menopausal characters. As I entered my own transition, I began reading the whole tiny canon of menopause literature. In Edith Wharton’s book , fifty-year-old Pauline Manford is so obsessed with staying thin and avoiding wrinkles that even her daughter compares her to a “deserted house.” Menopausal Rosalie Van Tümmler in Thomas Mann’s thinks her period has come back because of her infatuation with a younger man. On the night of their rendezvous, Rosalie begins to hemorrhage from her vagina, eventually slipping into a coma on a bed soaked with her own blood. The original German title of was , “the betrayed.”