Quilt on Fire: Friendship, Dating, Sex and Love

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My guest today is Trixi Symonds, an author and softie designer who has been teaching sewing to children for over 30 years. She is the founder of Sew Your Own Softie on Etsy Australia, and the Global Kids Sewing Party every year in March to inspire adults around the world to sew with kids in their lives.

Whilst the beginning isn’t particularly happy or uplifting, it is informative and insightful about the impact hormones and midlife can have on women. It sets the stage. As the story develops and the author opens up, with the help of her therapist, we see a much more content and accepting person. This is a book about the trials and tribulations of being a woman in midlife, focusing particularly on the perimenopause phase. It is written from the personal experience of the author and is punctuated with numerous anecdotal stories. In her early twenties, Christie Watson was convinced she'd found her soulmate, in a glowing flash of light that turned out to be a tealight setting her quilt on fire. Twenty years later, her bed is burning once again... as she wakes in a perimenopausal sweat, night after night.A superb chronicle of midlife and the chaos of the perimenopause. Candid, humorous, insightful, deeply empathetic, inspiring and utterly necessary' i Paper A rallying cry for all those confused by their forties, Watson captures midlife with typical fearlessness, humour and style. Her writer's eye never looks away from the truth but seeks only to illuminate it. Every woman should read this book Sarah Langford, author of IN YOUR DEFENCE Considering that Christie Watson is a nurse and an academic this is a surprisingly non-medical ‘guidebook’ to the ‘messy’ perimenopause build-up to menopause. If you are having a particularly bad time emotionally, and struggling with a sense of self (and self-worth) you may find this to be an empathetic and comforting read. I did not connect with it on many points and mostly found it a tiresome slog to read. The more interesting parts of the book: nursing, death and facts about the menopause are scattered through the chapters, but they are almost lost in the oversharing of the author’s life (way too much detail about her sex life and the drunken escapades of her friends). Along with frequent and unnecessarily use of the ‘f’ word, there is an irreverency about her writing which made me feel really sad. Such as, “It was all going so well until he took his top off. He had Jesus Loves Me tattooed on his chest”, and, “Bible Ben, as the mean kids called him”, but the author carries on calling him that throughout the book, even though she doesn’t consider herself one of the mean kids; as if we the reader won’t remember his name without its prefix. Rather than a celebration of womanhood, this book was for me a huge disappointment, and not the uplifting encouragement I’d hoped for. Christie Watson is fierce, funny and endearingly frank in her fantastic new memoir Jacqueline Wilson

Really important but it’s still quite a difficult conversation to have; it’s something new, not something they’re taught in schools but it affects children because it affects their mums and grandmas.An] insightful and outspoken exploration of middle age and the perimenopause Kate Kellaway, Observer A superb chronicle of midlife and the chaos of the perimenopause. Candid, humorous, insightful, deeply empathetic, inspiring and utterly necessary i Paper