I have a love/hate affair with Sandra Tsing Loh’s writing. She used to do more for the Atlantic. Truthfully, I miss her pieces. They always gave us something to talk about.

She has a new book out, where she argues that menopause isn’t a change, but a return to the default. In the Nation, she says,

It used to be thought that menopause is “the change.” But now that women can live until 90, we see that we’re only fertile those middle twenty-five years—less than a third of our lives. The hormonal “disturbance” is actually fertility. So menopause is not the change. Fertility is the change. When that estrogen cloud descends, a female loses herself. Menopause is your return to where you were before, when your hormone levels are the same as a pre-adolescent girl’s.