Watching Davina McCall’s two documentaries about the menopause in 2021 and 2022 was game-changing for me, as it was for so many others, and I followed it up with reading Confessions of a Menopausal Woman by Andrea McLean and Davina’s book Menopausing: The positive roadmap to your second spring, written with Dr Naomi Potter, and passing both onto my friends. When I saw that Mariella Frostrop was speaking at the Hay festival this year on her new book Cracking the Menopause: Whilst keeping yourself together, co-written with Alice Smellie, I booked myself a ticket and went to the festival bookshop afterwards to buy a copy and get it signed. It is written with great honesty and humour with some profanity thrown in. It covers everything you would expect – busting the myths on HRT, focusing on diet and exercise, how women are affected at work and what workplaces can do to support them, sleep deprivation, sex, the impact on relationships and much more. As with the other two books I’ve read on menopause, it is powerful stuff. Through their books, TV programmes and public speaking, these women in the public eye have stuck their heads above the parapet at risk to their careers to force the menopause into public discourse and I am very grateful to them all for that.