[Soft Skull Press; 2022]
When the U.S. women’s national team won the 2019 World Cup, they made history for becoming the first women’s soccer team to defend their title back-to-back — and the first to integrate their menstrual cycles into their training and recovery. Rather than fight or ignore these monthly hormonal changes, the team’s high-performance coach, Dawn Scott, tracked each athlete’s cycle and created phase-specific nutrition, hydration, sleep, and recovery strategies. For instance, to minimize the energy drain of the premenstrual phase, Scott reminded athletes to eat food rich in nutrients, fiber, and antioxidants. It worked. Rose Lavelle famously scored the U.S.’s second, title-clinching goal in the World Cup Final, despite being in the premenstrual phase. If ever there was a PMS tale heard around the world, this was it. Outlets from Good Morning America to The Guardian picked up the story, using Lavelle’s triumph to remind all menstruators that they, too, could work with their menstrual cycles.
Although no elite athlete herself, the American memoir writer Chloe Caldwell likely followed the U.S. women’s national team media coverage with interest. In the summer of 2019, she was halfway through writing her book on PMS (premenstrual syndrome) and PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder). Like Caldwell’s previous three books, The Red Zone: A Love Story is not a girlboss memoir with an inspiring redemptive arc. At no point does Caldwell, like Lavelle, lift herself from the ground and raise her arms in victory, having defeated her adversaries and her hormones. The Red Zone finds Caldwell in less flattering positions: on the ground of a bar, after fainting due to an increased dose of antidepressants; in bed all day, with the curtains drawn; on the toilet, suffering from menstrual diarrhea; on the paper-covered table of one dismissive doctor after another; on Reddit, where she finds relief in the Werewolf Week group, created for those who experience the dissociative rage of PMDD. No, this is not a girlboss memoir. It’s a PMS/PMDD memoir: a story of female creation in the face of fluctuation and destruction, and a story of love when that love is difficult to bear.
Having made her literary name as a Lena Dunham-esque antiheroine, Caldwell, now in her thirties, continues to expel toxic female narratives from her system with critical force. The Red Zone combines her earlier, often self-destructive enactments of female agency with her more recent, therapy-driven explorations of self-acceptance. Ever perceptive, Caldwell deflects her book’s thematic proximity to Goopish wellness culture, if not also capitalist optimization narratives, by naming their empty promises. Essential oils won’t turn a premenstrual Caldwell into her best self. “Find me in the middle of a PMDD episode,” warns Caldwell, “and hand me a bottle of essential oils and I promise you I will smash the bottle.” The self-knowledge offered by hormone-tracking apps only makes her feel guiltier in the red afterglow of her mood swings. Quoting Melissa Febos, Caldwell writes, “Self-knowledge didn’t save you, it only made it hurt more to watch yourself.” Dietary discipline is one tiresome solution among many: “It would be nice to just eat and drink without having to consider acne.” Channeling her PMDD into artistic production is doomed to fail: “How could I possibly get the swirling unknowable ephemeral capricious rage down on the page while maintaining a linear, organized book?” And honoring her body by drinking a cup of tea is bougie self-indulgence, not treatment for a medical condition: “I snorted. I hadn’t heard people talk about their periods that way.”
Snorting at how we’ve been taught to (not) talk about periods — or really, menstrual cycles — is exactly what Caldwell does throughout The Red Zone. By calling out American culture’s redirection of empowered female embodiment into ignorance and shame, Caldwell stages an intervention in what can be called “American menstrual culture.” In Part I, Caldwell reflects on the ubiquitous teenage practice of hiding tampons up their sleeves and asking friends to check their khaki-clad butts for spotting. Why didn’t she have a word for PMS then, wonders Caldwell, and why was she never told what a “normal” period is? Who could she have been without leak anxiety? Why do teenagers, both male and female, wield female hormones as a weapon of shame and disgust, insecurity and inferiority? And why, she thinks later in the book, did she dissect a pig in ninth-grade biology class, rather than a uterus? Restricting knowledge of female biology to a few classes in high school, the American Girl body book, or a hurried conversation with a sister is not a teenage rite of passage. It is the piercing-red manifestation of a system which bleeds in subtle hues, over lifetimes.
While filtered through Caldwell’s years-long attempts to understand her own PMS/PMDD, the book as a whole can be described as a consciousness-raising session: it is filled with the voices of menstruators, and each attendee in the circle speaks their pains and wishes. The most powerful chapter of the book is composed of first period stories. This chapter, “The Linen Closet,” moves chronologically, from Caldwell imagining her late grandmother’s first period, in 1932, to her younger cousin’s first period, in 2019. In an adjoining section of the same chapter, Caldwell then traces menstruation’s pop cultural evolution as it informed her own relationship with menstruation, from 1985 to 2020. Inspired by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff’s My Little Red Book, an anthology of first period stories, “The Linen Closet” melds a cultural history of menstrual product advertisements with personal narratives of shame and ignorance. Both the advertisements and the narratives are symptoms of a cultural illness, an illness which can be treated, first and foremost, by naming. In between an advertisement for the first menstrual cup and another featuring three adhesive pads doused in blue liquid, a contributor cuts to the heart of the problem: “Like what I really wish had happened was that someone had explained to me that the white cis hetero patriarchy is scared of women and their period blood and that’s why periods feel inherently shameful, why they pour blue liquid instead of red in all the pad and tampon commercials, etc.”
This menstrual culture blocking females, and their caregivers, from embodied knowledge is the point at which the personal becomes political and vice-versa. In The Red Zone, Caldwell describes years of living with a condition she can’t name, one dismissed by medical practitioners and friends alike. Since shame-free education locating menstruation within the cyclical fluctuation of hormones is largely unavailable, even in medical training, Caldwell initially receives psychological diagnoses — a phenomenon rooted in the psychiatric treatment of female hysteria (hystera means “uterus” in Greek). But Caldwell is convinced that her anxiety and depression are the result, not the cause, of something amiss in her body. She catalogues her symptoms: menstrual diarrhea “(No one said this book was going to be sexy.)”, heavy bleeding (“Heavy compared to what? Compared to whom?”), and rage. “[M]y heart beats faster,” writes Caldwell, “Emotions are on speed. Whatever is in my line of vision, I have a millisecond fantasy of throwing or smashing it, and am lucky when I don’t follow through. My breath is short and full of fire. I turn into a person I recognize as my other.” For Caldwell, what’s more frightening than this monthly transformation is that this person could be not her other but herself, unhinged from the reality shared by those around her. The Red Zone follows Caldwell as she — reflecting on the rage and paranoia and anxiety which greet her every month — searches for herself within her symptoms. Where does PMDD end and her personality begin? What is culture and what is choice?
A diagnosis, learns Caldwell, is neither the beginning nor the end. A diagnosis is a process of moving from one cycle to the next. Upon finally receiving a diagnosis of PMDD and cystic acne, Caldwell takes a picture of the slip of paper “because it felt like a true selfie.” From this moment of self-recognition onwards, The Red Zone focuses almost exclusively on Caldwell’s relationships with the musician Tony and his daughter Sadie, both of whose love in the first three parts of the book functions as a mirror, reflecting her need for intervention. As Tony and Sadie experience PMDD with her, they repurpose terms from pop, wellness, and scientific culture to make sense of its effects on her and them. The book’s chapters list the vocabulary of what ultimately becomes their shared language: from fluffiness to the linen closet and from dark matter to the opposite of light. There is no magic bullet for Caldwell’s PMDD, but perhaps her blended family with its hybrid language can break the cycle.
For a book about blood and the time leading up to bloodshed, The Red Zone’s central theme is surprisingly bloodless: making kin, making bonds out of broken ones, making narratives which, in turn, make space for the manifold experiences of menstruating bodies. Recovery is not the narrative arc of Caldwell’s PMS tale; rather, it’s finding a community which accepts her bloodred side and empowers her not to suffer needlessly. The book’s full title elegantly holds these ideas together. The red zone — Tony and Caldwell’s name for her PMS week — derives from a hormone-tracking app for partners of menstruators. The Red Zone proceeds both from Caldwell’s perspective and Tony’s; it’s A Love Story.
Elizabeth McNeill is a writer and editor completing her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. When not doing her cat’s bidding, she writes about female creativity, embodiment, and motherhood in contemporary literature. You can find her book musings on Twitter @eamcneill.
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