Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I'd Known About Menopause

As a nonfiction self-help and wellness book, Dare I Say It stands out for its highly personal and narrative-driven approach. While many menopause-related guides focus primarily on medical facts and treatment options, Watts blends expert insights with memoir-style storytelling, making the book both educational and relatable. Her use of humor, candid reflections, and accessible language helps bridge the gap between clinical information and real-life experience, ensuring that readers feel both informed and emotionally validated. Watts also uses her fame to bring attention to this underrepresented topic; her experience in the entertainment industry highlights representations of midlife women in the media, and she explores how this phenomenon manifests in her personal and professional lives. 

The book aligns with a growing trend in nonfiction wellness literature that prioritizes personal storytelling as a means of engagement. Rather than positioning herself as an expert, Watts presents herself as a fellow traveler on the journey through menopause, learning alongside her readers. This narrative technique not only makes the book more engaging but also helps to counteract the authoritative, often impersonal tone that dominates much of traditional medical literature. She uses medical experts and resources but frames the information imparted in the context of her own symptoms, pointedly centering a woman’s personal journey in the narrative. By sharing both her struggles and triumphs, Watts creates a space where women can see their own experiences reflected and feel less alone in their journeys. 

This strategy can be seen in other successful self-help books like Jen Sincero’s You Are a Badass, Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, and Shonda Rhimes’s Year of Yes. These books all use a conversational tone and humor to ensure accessibility, creating personal connections with anecdotes and testimonies from other people. This strategy creates a balance that both demystifies the topic and creates a sense of openness that facilitates connections with their audiences. 

Additionally, Dare I Say It contributes to a broader literary movement advocating for greater representation of women’s health issues. Historically, menopause has been underrepresented in mainstream literature, with most discussions occurring in medical texts rather than in books aimed at a general audience. Watts’s book joins a growing number of contemporary works that seek to normalize conversations around menopause, placing it within the larger context of women’s empowerment and health advocacy. Dare I Say It is in conversation with a number of recent works about perimenopause, including The New Menopause by Dr. Mary Claire Haver, who Watts consults as an expert in her own book, Dr. Lisa Mosconi’s The Menopause Brain, and Dr. Jen Gunter’s The Menopause Manifesto. By blending expert advice with anecdote and reflection, Watts also connects to more personal works about menopause, including Ann Douglas’s Navigating the Messy Middle, Heather Corinna’s What Fresh Hell Is This?, and Jancee Dunn’s Hot and Bothered. In doing so, she helps to redefine the self-help genre, proving that discussions of aging and menopause can be as engaging, affirming, and culturally relevant as any other major life transition.