A Femme Feral playlist

IT'S TODAY! FEMME FERAL IS ON BOOKSHELVES IN THE UK TODAY!

To celebrate, here's are some songs that inspired the novel. It's a useful playlist for when you need to channel some unhinged fury/eviscerate people.

I myself shall be listening to it on full volume while wandering around London signing books today. If you see me, come say hello! I'll be at West End Books (not Queen’s Park!) around noon, and Waterstones Walthamstow (the neighbourhood where a lot of the book is set) at 3:15.

I'd like to share an extract of the author's note that closes the book.

Midway through the journey of my life, I found myself within a dark forest, for the straightforward path had been lost. Until that point I had been a chronic overfunctioner, hyperactively taking care of everyone and everything around me. It had been an effective lifelong strategy: when I was a child, adults complimented me by saying I was‘three going on thirty-three’. I was very good, very productive, very nice, very competent. I truly believed that I did not ever feel angry.

One day, as I approached forty, all these carefully cultivated coping mechanisms failed. I had a quite exciting breakdown. I finally understood that underneath all my spreadsheets and my smiles and my lists lay something old, and festering, and furious.

This novel came roaring out of that place.

The core joke of this novel is that the medical industry knows about as much about perimenopause as it knows about lycanthropy. This is changing, but far too slowly, and there’s a lot of catching up to do. In the United States, the National Institutes of Health didn’t require research trials to include women until 1993. Even now, menopausal women are often excluded from clinical trials because researchers worry that our hormones make things too complicated. Men, of course, do not have hormones.

This book is a love letter to all the brilliant women in my life I’ve watched get passed over, get dismissed, get talked over, get misbelieved, get burnt out by the mental load, get attacked, get abused, and then get treated like they should be fucking grateful for it. It’s a howl in solidarity for those of us who’ve held it together for too long.

All you angry menopausal bitches out there, this book is for you.

Wishing you all healthy outlets for your rage,

Sam