With Bridget Christie’s Channel 4 comedy The Change back on screens and Miranda July’s “hot-flush lit” novel All Fours making the Women’s Prize shortlist, it has been a great spring already for nonmainstream “menoculture”.
Wishful-thinking headlines claiming that the menopause has “gone mainstream” are indeed much more mainstream than either the meno-themed The Change or the consciously perimenopausal All Fours.
The series and the book share DNA, in that their plots revolve around complicated midlife escapes – a joyful one in The Change, a sadder, desire-filled one in All Fours – in which responsibilities and husbands are left behind in the pursuit of new experiences and reclaimed identities.
Both fall under the category of brilliant things you would fervently recommend to some friends while not seeing the point of even mentioning them to others, and both are the product of talented, left-field multihyphenates.
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We’re told the menopause is now mainstream in culture, but is it really? And does it need to be?
July is an American author-film-maker-actor-artist who finds it belittling whenever her work is dubbed “quirky”, so she might not be ecstatic about the categorisation of All Fours as “weird” or “wacky”. Still, a strong case can be made for both adjectives.
Having just completed a wardrobe purge so extensive that it included the actual wardrobe, I laughed hard when I reached the page where its unnamed narrator – the same age as me – obsessively fills 11 black bags with everything she hasn’t worn in a year, plus a few things she wears all the time but deems depressing. I had no idea this was a rite of passage.
True, the rest of All Fours didn’t quite chime with my experience of being 45, not so far, but that only made me like it more.
Likewise, as magically lit as the Forest of Dean appears in The Change, I can’t say I have any specific plans to motorbike it to the countryside to lead an accidental revolt against gendered domestic drudgery while indulging in activities that might be mistaken for light witchcraft. That doesn’t stop Christie’s Linda from being the idiosyncratic menopausal heroine I want from television.
I’ve long been favourably disposed towards the English comedian-writer-actor of Irish descent and her fondness for the eccentric and absurd, which before the protracted process of getting The Change on air was mostly expressed through stand-up.
I first saw her at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2011, shortly after reading a review describing how she entered her Housewife Surrealist show dressed in bishop’s robes and monkey hands, while throwing wafers and dancing to a ska version of the Doctor Who theme. This sounded like my kind of thing, and so it proved.
Two years later, Christie’s satisfyingly feminist but still surreal show A Bic for Her played in a bigger, standing-room-only venue at the festival and won her the Edinburgh Comedy Award and, with it, a profile.
But the mainstream is a funny old club. There’s no membership list, because there’s no need for one: it’s possible to intuit who belongs to it and who doesn’t. Plenty of people with undeniable markers of popularity and acclaim – fans, sales, awards love, second seasons – remain on the outside.
Women who are original and daft in a clever way, like Christie, and women who are radical and individualist, like July, may be denied entry even as they run from the door.
Christie actually gasped in horror in a 2016 interview with The Irish Times when it was suggested she was moving into the mainstream. “Oh my God. No. No, no, no, no no,” was how she reacted, before observing that every year she felt as if she was “starting again”.
It probably says something about the status of a Channel 4 comedy in the age of streaming, but it doesn’t feel as if the commissioning, and subsequent recommissioning, of The Change has fundamentally altered that.
As for All Fours, well, it’s a phenomenon, but in that literary-fiction sense. Women press it into each other’s hands and discuss it at length, yet its existence doesn’t impinge on the consciousness of nonreaders.
The creative visibility of the menopause has improved since 2019, when a brief Kristin Scott Thomas speech – “horrendous, but then it’s magnificent” – in a single scene of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag elicited semi-shocked gratitude faster than anyone could say “Shirley Valentine was only 42”.
Those headlines about the mainstreaming of the menopause are understandable on one level: celebrities have been campaigning hard on it, while women have been obliged to add “roll eyes at workplace menowashing” to their list of stuff to do.
But they’re not true, are they? Women know they aren’t. In any case, menoculture is not a monoculture. The most interesting conversations are the ones happening parallel to the mainstream, or just beneath its surface. There’s an artistic freedom to this, which seems appropriate. What The Change and All Fours are really about is not “meno” but liberation, and the right to be strange.
