NAOMI WATTS: 'I was told I would never work again if I admitted to being menopausal.'

A while ago, a friend suggested I write a book on menopause. I resisted her advice for a long time. My fear was too great. Besides, I still knew nothing — just that it was fast approaching, and I was s**t scared.

I'd been warned ever since I started acting that calling attention to your age — when that age was not twenty-three or younger — would be career suicide. I was told I would never work again if I admitted to being menopausal, or even perimenopausal. Hollywood's lovely term for such women was "unf**kable."

Each year, two million American women enter menopause. That's almost six thousand women a day. We're talking a billion menopausal women worldwide. And yet, I felt completely alone.

Watch: On No Filter with Mia Freedman, Naomi Watts gets candid about sex, menopause, hormones and the shame she carried for so long. Post continues after video.

Ignorance of this transition led to shame and fear, and it almost cost me my chance to become a mother. The fact was I'd been showing perimenopause symptoms for some time but had never been told that's what they could be. When a woman comes in complaining of symptoms like night sweats, anxiety, and insomnia, that should be a doctor's cue to make sure she knows the facts about perimenopause and menopause. I mean, I partly get the doctors' reluctance to open that conversation.

After a few years of being in this space and speaking to them one-on- one, I've come to understand how little time they have to strike up a hard conversation. If they have only fifteen minutes with a patient, why would they want to drop a bomb? Surely the messenger would be killed. I would have slapped my own doctor if he hadn't been so bloody handsome! Why not just do the Pap smear or blood test, and if the woman's distraught, hand her a script for an antidepressant or sleeping pill?

Put the menopause conversation to another day and, with any luck, to another doctor! There's no question that women in their forties and fifties have been gaslit by the medical system, with real consequences to their well-being, even if there's now a welcome pendulum swing toward more attention to menopause and to various forms of symptom relief. And relief is possible!

I'll talk about how hormone replacement therapy (also known as HRT, or menopause hormone therapy [MHT], or just hormone therapy [HT]) has helped me, and what questions to ask if you're considering it. I'll use HRT here because that's how it was introduced to me, and I've stuck with it.

I think it's worth considering where the long silence came from. Might it not have something to do with misogyny, the patriarchy, and ageism? And with our desire not to inconvenience anybody? But why did we women think that should be the goal — to never need any help? How radical it has been to realise the ways in which I'd silenced myself because of sexism.

I've realised that we don't need to people-please. We don't have to make things easy for everyone else at every turn. We can take up space. We can say what we need. We can assert ourselves!

I've also come to believe that there is nothing sexier than a woman who knows what she wants. All good relationships at work and at home — and at the doctor's office — require communication. We can discuss without shame the details of menopause — how to navigate it, what the symptoms could be, and not just "Oh, you might feel warm at some point." But all the gory details.

I didn't know my skin would get so dry, or that urinary tract infections and GI issues would become commonplace, or that there was such a long list of other issues connected to the menopausal transition. I was craving information on menopause, and certainly no one in Hollywood was breathing a word about it. We were all behaving as if between the seductress years and the grandmother roles, women just… I don't know, vanished? Well, I got madder and madder until I no longer cared about the potential cost to my career. Hell, if I needed information, others probably did, too. And by that point I'd been dealing with menopause for a decade, so I thought that maybe — just maybe — I could offer something to those coming to it fresh.

In October 2022, I founded a company called Stripes Beauty to address various practical needs of women my age (for example, by offering a lubricant "play oil" and an intensive skin moisturiser to help with the massive hydration loss that comes with middle age). Stripes Beauty's three pillars are menopause education, community, and solutions from scalp to vag.

In the same spirit, I started working on this book, which will attempt to cover every aspect of menopause I've encountered. It's intended to be the sort of resource I wish I'd had when I walked out of that doctor's office in pieces and truly terrified. I've written this book for anyone who's going through menopause and trying to figure out what the hell is happening and for everyone who will go through it and wants to be well-prepared so that they're not blindsided like I was. I've always shied away from jumping on the soapbox. But the menopause conversation requires us to get honest, loud, and, dare I say it, even a little unladylike. Faaaaark!

One of the funniest things that's happened as a result: random celebrities now text me regularly to tell me they're in menopause. It's like I'm behind the confessional window, or I'm Hollywood's agony aunt. But I enjoy it! I welcome them to the club and offer them doctor suggestions or whatever they're looking for, which is often just someone to listen to them without judgment.

In this book I'll tell you everything I tell them and in what I hope is enough detail to spare you all the searching I had to do as I was flailing my way through this transition. Caveat: I'm not a doctor (I've never even really played one in movies, though I played a midwife once), but I've come to know plenty of them since I started banging on about menopause. I've always considered myself someone who's good at putting people together, whether that's throwing a dinner party, producing a film, or organising a pickleball tournament (yes, I've done that). I trust my instincts when it comes to identifying talented people. And so that is what I have done here.

To offer the most up- to-date information and the most inspiring stories, I've assembled brilliant experts — gynaecologists, psychologists, dermatologists — and a diverse group of fascinating women with stories to tell about menopause, from a friend of mine in her seventies having the best sex of her life to a woman in her late forties who had a panic attack live on television.

How do we make this the most empowering, exciting time of our lives as women? This is when we have the experience in our work, in our relationships, and in our bodies to know what we have to offer the world. We don't need anyone else's permission.

All we need are the tools and the information to unapologetically stride into the powerful, joyful age ahead of us.

Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I'd Known About Menopause by Naomi Watts. Image: Penguin Australia.

Extracted from Dare I Say it by Naomi Watts. Available now as an eBook, audiobook and through bookstores.

Read more about Naomi Watts:

• Naomi Watts is done being ashamed.

• 'I'm pretty proud of us.' Inside Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber's blended family.

• 'I went into complete panic.' At 36, Naomi Watts started going through perimenopause.

Feature image: Getty.