The fun starts early in Naomi Watts’s Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known About Menopause. Picture the scene. We’re at chapter three, Vag of Honour, and Watts, who has recently separated from the actor Liev Schreiber, has just embarked on a relationship with Billy Crudup, the star of films such as Almost Famous and Alien: Covenant. Having met on the set of the TV series Gypsy where, as she so elegantly puts it, the two of them spent months “dry-humping each other to the point of exhaustion”, the big night has now at last arrived. She and Crudup will shortly sleep together for the first time.
Before things can get too “hot and frisky”, however, Watts briefly exits. “Let me slip into something more comfortable,” she tells Crudup, heading for the bathroom. Most female readers – most readers, full stop – will assume at this point that she’s going to pee or brush her teeth, or perhaps to reassure herself about which bits were waxed, and when, and that her coy tone is just a joke. But Watts, it seems, has another, quite different worry. What will Crudup think if he sees the skin patch she uses for her HRT (hormone replacement therapy)? “I worried that if he saw it he would realise it meant I was menopausal [and] no longer a vital, fertile human being,” she writes. And so she busily sets about peeling it off.
