I’d be willing to shut up if you’d be willing to take off your clothes

Perimenopause + a part I cut out of All Fours + blowing up your life + I flirt with a fictional man

Before she interviewed me for Fresh Air last month, Terry Gross remarked on how the title of my novel at first seems to be a sexual reference, all fours, but was ultimately about…a table! “Your desk in your office, with one leg shorter than the others!” I corrected her, the narrator’s desk, but was thinking: What? I’d never made a connection between the title and that fictional, wobbly desk. Though it is true that when the two words are finally spoken, a table is mentioned (“Like a table. It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours”) , so maybe she was right.

This happens all the time, readers make connections I haven’t noticed yet.

The only reason the narrator had a wobbly desk is because, in an early draft, she eventually puts a slim book under the shorter leg and it stops wobbling — a sort of funny moment of practical resolution. My actual desk never wobbled, but the slim book was real – a self-help book called God, What Is Happening To Me?

There were very few books about perimenopause/menopause when I first started writing the novel and I ordered them all. This one turned out to be from a Christian perspective and the gist of it was: Jesus suffered and so can you. I had been hoping for a spiritual take, not this one, but something.

I thought of the Christian book, God What Is Happening To Me?, still wedged under my desk at home and another book with a similar title; Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. Many women my age had read it as girls; it was about puberty. What was it about these hormonal transitions that made us address God? Somehow – no one knew how – our mortal bodies had been quickened, made alive. And at two times, puberty and climacteric, they changed so dramatically and painfully that we could not help but ask why? Why am I here? Despite eons of shaming, the estrogened still lifted their chins to God and wondered this aloud. Usually just through living but sometimes in a story. All the climacteric¹ books ended in question marks because all the great themes are unsolvable mysteries.