Acknowledgements
From our upcoming book on perimenopause from the perspective of two counselling psychologists, one female, one male.
No book is written alone, and this one is no exception. Gaye and I wish to acknowledge the many collaborators, tools, technologies, and sentient stationery items that made this work possible.
First, to Microsoft Word, without whom none of this would have been formatted in a way that crashed only twice during the final export. Word has been a faithful companion across four decades of publishing, if by ‘faithful’ you mean ‘prone to reformatting your entire document at 2am because you accidentally pressed a key that doesn’t appear on any known keyboard’. We are grateful for its service, its inscrutable pagination decisions, and its ongoing commitment to changing the default font to Calibri despite nobody, at any point in human history, having asked for this.
To the Mont Blanc Meisterstück 149, the fountain pen that costs more than most people’s first car and writes with approximately the same fuel efficiency. Every word of the early outlines was drafted with this instrument, lending the manuscript an air of gravitas that the actual content may or may not have deserved. There is something about writing with a pen that retails for the price of a return flight to Frankfurt that makes even a grocery list feel like a philosophical treatise. We acknowledge the Meisterstück’s contribution to the book’s tone, and to our overdrafts.
To the Leuchtturm1917 notebooks—the A5, dotted, in Nordic Blue—which handled the Mont Blanc’s ink without feathering, bleeding, or staging the kind of dramatic protest that cheaper paper mounts when confronted with actual fountain pen ink. The Leuchtturm costs roughly eight times what a perfectly serviceable Officeworks exercise book costs, which is the price of having pages that lie flat and a table of contents page at the front that we filled in once, abandoned by page four, and have never looked at since. We acknowledge the notebook’s quality, its aspirational pagination system, and the seventeen others sitting in a drawer with three pages used.
To the Moleskine Corporation, whose marketing department has successfully convinced three generations of writers that Hemingway used their notebooks, a claim that has approximately the same relationship to historical fact as the assertion that Napoleon was short. We acknowledge the Moleskine’s contribution to the literary aesthetic of café writing, and its ongoing refusal to accept that fountain pen ink exists.
To the artisanal quill pen, hand-cut from ethically sourced goose feather by a third-generation craftsman in the Cotswolds whose name we cannot share because his waiting list is already fourteen months and the last thing he needs is publicity. The quill was used for precisely one paragraph of Chapter 6 before the ink ran out, the nib split, and Gaye pointed out that we were writing a psychology book in the twenty-first century, not a letter of complaint to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1743. We acknowledge the quill’s aesthetic contribution and the feather’s subsequent career as a bookmark.
To the Sumerian-style clay tablet, sourced from an upmarket manufacturer in East London who specialises in ‘heritage writing surfaces for the discerning creative professional’ and charges accordingly. The tablet was used to draft the initial chapter structure in cuneiform, partly as an experiment in tactile ideation and partly because Lee had read an article about embodied cognition and gotten carried away. The tablet now sits on a shelf in Đà Lạt, holding down a stack of Leuchtturm notebooks, performing the only function at which clay tablets have ever truly excelled: being heavy.
To Google Docs, which we used briefly before discovering that it tracks every keystroke, timestamps every edit, and essentially turns collaborative writing into a forensic evidence trail that would make any self-respecting procrastinator weep. We moved back to Word. At least Word has the decency to crash without keeping records.
To coffee. Obviously.
To the Vietnamese cà phê sữa đá at the little place on Phan Đình Phùng that doesn’t have a name but does have a woman who remembers your order and judges you if you haven’t been in for three days. She didn’t write any of the book, but she kept one author vertical during the months when the perimenopausal research was getting heavy and the men’s chapter was getting honest and the whole project occasionally felt like trying to explain colour to someone who’s spent their life in a monochrome institution, which, now we think about it, is more or less what we were doing.
To Gaye’s GP, who learned about perimenopause alongside Gaye and had the grace to admit it, and whose willingness to say ‘I don’t know, let’s find out together’ is a model of clinical humility that the profession would do well to notice.
To Huơng, who lived the experience this book describes, who permitted Lee to write about it with an honesty that she didn’t have to allow, and who still, occasionally, throws twelve bells of hell over a salt shaker—but now they both know why.
To every woman who read an early draft and said ‘finally’. To every man who read an early draft and said ‘I had no idea’. You are the reason the book exists. The ‘finally’ and the ‘I had no idea’ are the same sentence, viewed from opposite sides of the bed.
Oh, and Claude had some ideas as well.
But what would he know.