Perimenopause at Work

You are mid-sentence in a meeting, and the word is simply gone.

Nobody else notices. You think about it for the rest of the afternoon.

This is a book about the workday, not about your body. It will not diagnose you, recommend hormone therapy, promise that anything will improve, or tell you what your employer is required to do. There are twelve other places to read about symptoms. There are very few about the meeting you still have to chair on Thursday.

Ruth Aldermere starts where the week actually starts: naming one hard moment plainly, before deciding what it means. From there the book works outward through the things you can change without telling anyone - the weekly page, the two columns, the hour worth protecting, the calendar seen whole, the drawer stocked before you need it - and then through the conversations, if and when you want them: the decision at your manager's door, the sentence you wrote down in advance, the small ask to the colleague at the next desk.

There is no schedule here and nothing to count. Each chapter ends with one small thing you could do this week, at your own desk, and says plainly what it will not do.

It ends with a written request, a short list of the people worth having a name for, and a week you can point at and say what you changed.