There was “an air conditioner and a fan and a wide-awake woman glaring at a sleeping man,” begins Arlington author Melissa Avstreih’s self-published book.
Goodnight Menopause is a parody of the beloved children’s bedtime story Goodnight Moon, in which a sleepy bunny says goodnight to everything in the room. In Avstreih’s version, a menopausal woman says goodnight to the various indignities of this confounding life stage.
The idea for the book came to Avstreih, 47, while she and a friend were commiserating about their menopause symptoms over dinner. Giggling as they bid adieu to their younger selves in the lilting, rhyming style of the children’s classic, the Lyon Village mom of two felt compelled to write it all down.
“We were just lamenting over all of the symptoms of menopause that we were experiencing and kind of joking, like, ‘Oh, our husbands are just sleeping through the night and we’re up sweating and with insomnia,'” she says. “I was still laughing about it the next day, so I put pen to paper. I was like, ‘If I can laugh about this with my friends, I would love for other people to be able to laugh about it with their friends.’”
She wrote the bulk of the book—her first—while watching her son at a swim team practice. “It came together really quickly,” says Avstreih, a communications specialist at a federal government agency.
For help with the illustrations, she turned to Bryony van der Merwe, whom she found on Fiverr, a marketplace for freelance services. “Some of the pictures are actually my real-life experiences, like I remember weighing myself and sitting on the floor, curled in a ball, crying at the scale,” Avstreih says.
(Hence the book’s poetic verse referencing “a growing waistline and estrogen in decline.”)
“And the picture of the woman lying in her bed with the covers around just her shoulders and her legs are out, that’s how I sleep because I’m so hot,” she continues.
Although writing the book has not helped her make peace with the changes happening to her body, Avstreih says it has allowed her to laugh about them. She hopes the humor will help other women to feel comfortable sharing their own experiences.
“It opened the door to more bonding with some of my friends and neighbors,” she says. “When I told them I wrote the book and I gave them copies, we were reading it together and it opened that conversation. It was like strength in numbers: When you feel like you and your friends are going through the same thing, it just makes it a little easier.”
That’s a very Gen X thing to do, she adds: Make people comfortable talking about previously hush-hush topics.
“It was really our generation that lit the fire for more work/life balance, and we need to be able to work from home. Millennials are benefiting from that, but I actually think it was us that started it,” Avstreih contends. “We were the latchkey kids. We knew what it felt like to come home and mom wasn’t there, and [we listened to] Salt-N-Pepa’s song Let’s Talk About Sex. That was us. Now here we are going through menopause and we’re the ones that are saying, ‘Let’s talk about these things. Let’s not sweep them under the rug.’ ”
Ultimately, she hopes the book helps readers find levity in their own menopause challenges. “This is happening to our bodies regardless, and there are things I’m sure you could do to make the symptoms better, but I can’t imagine any perfect solution to make everything go away,” says the author. “I personally think laughter is the best medicine— especially laughing with your girlfriends.”
Find Goodnight Menopause in paper and hardback versions at Barnes & Noble, Amazon and Bookshop.org. And watch for Avstreih’s next book, Seashells of the Jersey Shore, the first in a three-book series about shells on East Coast beaches, to be released in April 2025.