Claudia Putnam

The other day I had lunch with someone who is a mix of colleague, old friend, mentor, and teacher. I’m not sure how he sees me, but I look up to him a lot. That day, I had been spending time with my thoughts and my pages, but hadn’t spoken to anyone out loud. When I caught up with him, I found out that I was a little disorganized.

It wasn’t just that my hair hadn’t dried yet, or that I was some minutes late, which is something people seem to notice in the East, when it wouldn’t even register in my usual habitat. I just felt scattered, flustered, and sweaty.

Later I spoke with a friend who is about a decade older than me, a successful young-adult novelist who told me she is retiring from writing, at least for the foreseeable future. Does your decision have anything to do with menopause? I asked.

I told her some of the confusing cognitive effects I’d been experiencing. Oh, she said. That’s temporary. Your mind comes back. She added: You do get a few years between menopause and Alzheimer’s when you can think.

She was quitting, she said, because she had nothing to say to anyone.

That was the part, I said, that felt like menopause to me. I still had things to say, but I kept falling into these emotionally blank spots where I wanted the world to leave me alone.

An end to nurturing, she said.

Yes, I said. Look, I’ve even wondered if menopause isn’t stalling out the careers of all these women I know in their 50s. They just gradually get either disinterested or grumpy or both. They stop putting out the effort, or they grow unpleasant to work with. The frog in gradually heating water thing. So they don’t promoted, or they get put on the projects no one wants, including them.

Over time they get isolated, which makes them more bitter and more grumpy, and more unpleasant to work with. The next thing you know they’re fired, or they quit. And they can’t find the energy or the interest to go out and sell themselves. Plus they’re angry.

The thing is, this is something that would pass… in, um,… maybe ten years. But because what happened was so gradual and environmental and reinforced by so many feedback loops, they don’t even know what it was, and now it’s built into their sense of self.

I remember seeing a Tweet from an agent. I won’t take any crazy or rude clients, she declared. What about cranky menopausal women, I wondered. Was this agent so sure she would have perfect self-control when she hit, oh, say, 48?

My writer friend had to be tracked down by phone. I’d been wanting to talk to her for several months because my neighbor’s twins loved her last book so much they nearly came to blows over it. I wanted her to know this, how vivid she made the world she’d built for them. The easiest way to reach out, the most socially appropriate given the relationship she and I have, would have been via email.

But you can’t email her. She’s cut herself off from all that. She’s gradually been moving to a remote place that used to be her vacation spot. A very-off-the-beaten-path kind of vacation spot. Now, the only way anyone, including her editor, can reach her, is by phone.

If she chooses at some time in the future, to reengage, will she be able to? Isn’t this something you have to practice? What happens when a woman checks out for a decade or more?

(I don’t mean to mislead. She has friends and a husband. Still, she’s streamlined her life considerably over the years.)

The last time I saw this friend we were climbing in Eldorado Canyon, outside Boulder. When we finished our conversation this time and I clicked off the cell, I stood for a moment tracing the figure-eight knot in the air. I ran a rope through an invisible belay device. Belay on, I whispered.

She’s more an acquaintance—our connections have been infrequent but quite deep—than a close friend, and it took some energy for me to call her, much more than it would have for me to email or message her on Facebook.

But I’m going to try to stay in touch, if only out of selfishness. She spoke of windsurfing, gardening, and wayfinding on her mountainside. I need to do find my way, too.

Woman, you’re on belay.