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In the United States 1992-1993 was the year of the horrific menopause anecdote. Women were inundated with menopause discourse: all the loss, misery, humiliation, and despair supposedly in store for us unless we took the pharmaceutical exit from female midlife aging. Daily press stories, women's magazine articles, talk-show discussions, major magazine essays, two books for popular consumption by well-known women writers (both achieved best-seller status, for a while simultaneously), obligatory reviews of the best-sellers, a menopause anthology. Merging and overlapping and reinforcing at the overlaps, the discourses made menopause as public as fame can, leading (since men overhear everything) around back again into private life. The circulation/dissemination was remarkably thorough, in a mainstream culture based on repetition passing for the new.(Readers feel they are getting important new news …