I vote Sandra Tsing Loh to be most likely to be included in my group of friends on a trip to a day spa for wine, brunch and massages. I know she would fit right in with my brilliant witty girlfriends. She is like the friend that gets me and experiences things I experience just a mere two years ahead of me. I am her demographic.

In her latest personal memoir Loh takes on her year of surviving perimenopause hormonal changes while dealing with the fall-out from her divorce (which was famously chronicled in the Atlantic) while dealing with tweens and an aging father. Let's just say I can relate to all of it and it is good to know it will all come out well in the end.

Thank you Sandra--the Gail Sheehy for Generation X.

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No. It gets better as it goes along, but no. I think this probably works as a stand up comic routine, but in print it feels shallow. There are a few good scenes – one in which she flies up to an old friend’s funeral where she knows no one and discovers he was depressed despite the happy Christmas cards. Or when she looks at celadon bowl filled with persimmons in a manicured store and realizes her life is not that. (I think this is what she realizes.) Her father adds grit to this tale but it still feels like a confessional of the utterly self-absorbed elite.
I was reminded of Briget Bardot who at 50 felt the need to publicly proclaim a warning to all women that their bodies would get old. I am paraphrasing here “ I did everything I could for this body and it still got old.”
I can’t decide if that’s funny or sad. Same with Madwoman in the Volvo.
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Loving a book, like loving a person, is so much about timing. This book came to me just when I needed laughter, comfort and relief. Loh is smart, sharp, and honest, and "Madwoman" offers quick wit combined with funny-but-true tales. ( )

I expected to enjoy this more than I did, because I enjoy her magazine essays. Oddly, even though we learn all about her affair and leaving her husband and children and then the difficulties with her new husband, I felt we never really got to know Loh - perhaps because she was trying too hard to be funny. ( )

Madwoman in the Volvo is Sandra Tsing Loh’s memoir about her 40s leading up to menopause. This book is uproariously funny in parts but does tend to get a bit somber in the middle when she talks about her father, a man with a ridiculously low heart rate who simply will not give up the ghost. Sandra is the single mother of 2 tween girls, and she miraculously sees a parallel between her daughters’ hormonal conditions and mental state before the onset of menses with her own condition at the other end of the reproductive spectrum. Long story short: if you’re struggling through this passage of life, it gets better. Highly recommended. Read with an empty bladder. Perfect for women’s book clubs. You’ll howl with laughter until you cry. ( )