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| Sandra Tsing Loh |
Sandra Tsing Loh is mad -- well, a Mad
Woman at least. In her latest memoir,
The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones, Loh reveals the dark side of being a woman ... and a wife and a mother.
Loh, who is both hilarious and thoughtful, will be speaking this weekend at the
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and she took time to speak with L.A. Story about her new book, what it's like to go through menopause, some advice she's saving for her two daughters (ages 12 and 13) and where she likes to take her girls in L.A.
Tell me a little about your book, The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones.
The book is my memoir of menopause – “meno-memoir,” I guess.
It’s based on this piece I wrote for
The Atlantic Monthly on menopause called
The Bitch is Back, and it won the Best American Essay in 2012. This is an
extension of that. It’s a book about a year in the life of a woman
transitioning into menopause. It’s actually perimenopause, when the hormone
levels are just swinging wildly up and down. You don’t know what’s happening to
your body or your mood or your brain cells or anything. It’s a pretty wild
ride.
It’s also a memoir of other things. I also had a midlife crisis, I had an affair in the middle of my marriage.
I blew up my marriage, and I ended up in this little bachelor cottage, and I
had too much wine and Ambien, and then my right side became a paralyzed claw.
So everything that could go wrong went wrong.
Perimenopause, I've read, can start in your late 30s, which seems kind of scary. Were you surprised by the onset of
perimenopause?
Yes, it can start in the late 30s, but it can last between
4 and 14 years. I was surprised myself—in my book it describes
just driving along the freeway, coping with a bunch of stuff and then suddenly
my mood fell, just dropped through the car and into the Earth. And it’s hormonal. It’s like where you go, “I am losing my
mind.”
We all have too much on our plates, and I think especially
the sandwich generation, and we all have our little ways of coping and getting
through the day, where suddenly your little coping mechanisms -- your little
jazz station, your half sandwich, your glass of Pinot Grigio at 6 -- are not
working at all and you feel really black and dark, and that’s how it felt to
me.
And my mom had been very depressed and actually ended up
getting early Alzheimer’s, and you’re going, “Oh my gosh, am I reliving my
mother’s history?”
How did you treat it?
In the book there’s this speech by the gynecologist -- the
wonder gynecologist -- and she said, “You know, there are two kinds of girls: the
Chinet girls and the paper plate girls. The Chinet girls, you can pile a lot
on their plate and they don’t crack, and the paper plate girls, you can put a
carrot on there, and they’ll just shatter to pieces. And so it’s a combo
platter where she says, “I think at heart you’re a Chinet girl, but you’re
going through a lot of physiological stuff right now and having an emotional
response, so you can do two things. … And I finally went to the doctor after a
year because I so didn’t want to be weighed. and I
got a little better advice.
When these waves of either emotion or sadness or grief or
rage come over you, know that it’s part of what your body’s doing right now.
You can either just watch it happen and then start the next narrative to say,
“Oh my God, I’m going crazy.” Just let it happen, and you can take a little bit
of antidepressants, low level for a while or a little bit of estrogen or
hormones for a while to balance you out, and you can also take stuff off your
plate.
So you strengthen the plate, and you also start taking stuff off it. If
you’re the PTA president, step down. If you’re worried about getting your
Christmas letters out in March, just don’t do it at all. Nobody wants them
anyway. Just to really give yourself a break across the board, and if you want
to stay in bed all Saturday and set a record for spending the longest period of
time in bed, stay in bed. I think that women, we all have too much stuff and
we’re all trying to wear too many hats -- being a good wife, a good mother, a good
this and a good that, while our hormones are imbalanced. Even when they are
balanced, we shouldn’t because it’s just too much.
You’ve written candidly about your life. Is there anything
you would say is off limits, that you wouldn’t write about?
I think when memoirists have to write, I think they should
be careful if they have relationships with family and with friends because if the people around you haven’t given you explicit permission
for you to tell their story, then it’s not fair to. I wrote the book,
I’m implicated in doing a lot of bad stuff, but the people around me are
basically fine. When we write memoirs, we kind of choose some of the details to
tell the story of specifically our own stuff, but we might change some of the
identifying details of the other people to protect them.
I never write about sex. I don’t write about it very well.
That’s never going to be the book I’m going to write.
Do you have any special mom advice that you’ve given or are saving for your
daughters?
Having gone through such a roller coaster of mine in terms
of marriage and divorce and all of that, I’ll have lots of advice for them when
they get older, but there not at that place now, in terms of maritally.
I had a very good relationship for 20 years, and I still
honor that, and I wouldn’t do that differently, but I think that I no longer
really hold people to the standard, or judge them if after 20 or 30 years their
relationship needed a change. We live a long time.
For my daughters, it’s interesting because in my book I have
broken down a lot in front of my daughters but have survived and then they’ve
helped me out a bit and they’re very balanced now. And it’s sort of how we’ve
gotten through life. I think, since my divorce and blowup, that we have a
harmony and sensibility about being together. Everybody’s façade has cracked,
and now we’re actually more friends and it’s great. It’s very comfortable.
But wisdom…girls, for them to be whoever they want to be and be
interested in what they are and not try to live up to the various roles that
people will put on them or the ones they’ll put on themselves. That’s so true.
It’s always true with women.
You're an alum of USC's Master of Professional Writing program. I graduated from that same program. What do you think about USC's recent decision to end it in 2016?
I think that’s really sad. It’s just sad, and it came as a
huge surprise. It’s such a special place in Los
Angeles for people to be not just movie and TV writers but also prose writers
and poets and playwrights if they want to. Students have come from all over the world to Los
Angeles, and they really found a home in that program, and those relationships
will have continued long after they’ve been in the program. It’s really sad.
Where do you like to go with your kids in L.A.?
In Van Nuys, there’s something called the
94thAero Squadron, which is this themed restaurant at the Van Nuys Airport, and it
has a World War II theme, and it’s really hilarious. For dinner it’s really
funny.
The great thing to do is go to the
Huntington Gardens. It’s
beautiful—the kids can run around and mom can appreciate it also.
Now that they’re 12 and 13, it’s thrift stores.
In Pasadena, where I live, there’s one called Acts, and all of the new
Goodwills are awesome. They’re so trendy and cool, and there’s like a shirt for
$2. It’s really great. For tween girls, they almost don’t remember that you can
buy retail clothing.
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