The most radical thing a woman in public life can do is answer a question honestly. Not diplomatically, not strategically, not with an eye on the headline - but plainly, with her actual life on the table. The answers above, given by a woman sitting on the floor of a half-furnished flat in Paris, fresh from a shoot, dressed like Anita Pallenberg channelling Calamity Jane, constitute something that is still, quietly, unusual: a public self-portrait that refuses to flatter.
The Pharmacology of Being a Woman in Midlife
She lists her medications the way a person reads a receipt - Sertraline, beta blockers, Elvanse, testosterone, progesterone, HRT - and then catches herself. "This is the first time I've been embarrassed to admit I'm on something," she says. "It feels so scary to admit your body is drying up." That single sentence does more to illuminate the experience of perimenopause and menopause than most awareness campaigns manage in a year.
The stigma she identifies is real and documented in clinical literature. Women who have spoken openly about psychiatric medication for decades, who have normalised therapy and mental health conversations, still flinch at hormone replacement. The taboo is not about weakness; it is about visibility. To say "my body is changing in ways I cannot control or conceal" is to surrender a particular kind of social armour. SSRIs and stimulants carry their own freight, of course - she takes Elvanse, a medication used for ADHD, which carries its own charged cultural baggage - but the hormonal disclosure sits differently. It marks time. It announces a threshold.
HRT, for what it is worth, has had a complicated public history. After a large observational study in the early 2000s raised concerns about certain risks, prescriptions collapsed across Western medicine. Subsequent decades of research substantially revised that picture, restoring HRT's standing for many women as an effective and relatively safe intervention. The fear, however, outlasted the data. Many women still arrive at the perimenopause undertreated, under-informed, and carrying shame they did not create and were never given reason to examine.
Overshare as a Literary Form
She says she suffers from "overshare-itis" and is writing a memoir to contain it. This is worth pausing on. The instinct she describes - telling everyone, holding nothing back - is not simply a personality trait; it is, increasingly, both a literary tradition and a survival strategy. The confessional memoir, from its roots in Augustine and Rousseau through to the contemporary tradition of writers like Mary Karr and Maggie Nelson, has always been the space where what cannot be said in polite society gets said precisely and at length.
Women, in particular, have used the form to reclaim narrative authority over their own lives - experiences that medicine had pathologised, relationships that society had romanticised, bodies that culture had claimed ownership over. To write a memoir is not necessarily to seek sympathy; it is to insist that your version of events exists, has shape, and deserves a reader. The woman on the floor in Paris, who hides behind her screen and fakes her confidence, who loves her cat Ravioli and Nan Goldin and Puccini in equal measure, is doing something structurally similar in miniature: she is refusing to edit herself for palatability.
Shame, Eldest Daughters, and the Arithmetic of Enough
Two things she names as holding her back: shame, and not feeling good enough. She also names "eldest daughter syndrome" - the condition, widely recognised in psychological literature on family systems, in which the firstborn daughter internalises excessive responsibility, measures her worth by her output, and finds rest almost physically impossible to justify. "The only thing that gives me a sense of accomplishment is slaving all day at a desk," she says, "which is absurd because so much of my career is front-facing."
That word - absurd - is doing important work. She can see the irrationality clearly, name it accurately, and still be governed by it. This is not a failure of self-knowledge; it is the nature of internalised standards. They do not dissolve simply because you can identify them. The gap between intellectual understanding and lived experience is one of the central problems that therapies like CBT, ACT, and psychodynamic work all attempt to address, with varying success and timelines.
Her jealousy, she says, is reserved for "people who know themselves and never seem to doubt the road ahead." It is worth noting that such people may be performing certainty as much as she performs confidence. The difference between them might be less about inner compass and more about willingness to show the doubt. She shows it. That is, as it turns out, its own form of self-knowledge.
What Gets Left on the Plate
She wants more meaning. She is saving a cannelé and the last episode of a television series for later. She blasts cheesy musicals and dances alone to recharge. She finds a man opening a door genuinely sexy, and knows this coexists without contradiction with her feminism. These are not contradictions in the way a profile might frame them - they are the texture of an actual interior life, where wanting meaning and wanting a pastry can share the same afternoon without either being diminished.
The value of a self-portrait this honest is not that it resolves anything. It does not offer conclusions about how to manage perimenopause, or whether oversharing is healthy, or whether eldest daughters can be cured of their compulsions. Its value is that it demonstrates, with some precision, what it looks like when a woman decides that accuracy matters more than impression management. In a media environment that still rewards the performed self over the reported one, that is not nothing. It might, quietly, be everything.
