Why Do Women Go Through Menopause and Not Men? Evolutionary Geneticist Deena Emera Unravels this Mystery and More in the History of the Female Body
Show Snapshot:
Why do women go through menopause and not men? What is the purpose of the female orgasm? How have breasts, menstruation, pregnancy, and the female form evolved throughout human history? Dr. Deena Emera—an evolutionary geneticist and author of A Brief History of the Female Body, helps us unravel these fascinating mysteries and more. We also explore the question of why menopause exists and how increased longevity calls into question whether or not menopause should exist at all. Bonus! Learn more about your body than you ever knew before!
Show Links:
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Deena’s Book: A Brief History of the Female Body: An Evolutionary Look at How and Why the Female Form Came to Be
Quotable:
Once a woman goes through menopause it triggers a cascade of concerning health issues, because our reproductive hormones decline. It's not really just about fertility; it's about our health. And so why do we have to go through this and not men? And I think we have a pretty good answer to that question.
Transcript:
Katie Fogarty 0:03
Welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. I'm your host Katie Fogarty. Beauties, I've recorded more than 150 podcasts. So I can safely say that it is a ton of fun and an astonishing amount of work. I can also say that I've learned more about my body and health from interviewing podcast guests than I ever have in a doctor's office, which says a lot about the state of medicine here in the US. My education continues with today's guest. Your education continues with today's guest. I am joined by Dr. Deena Emera, an evolutionary geneticist and educator who has written a fascinating, enjoyable, highly readable book called A Brief History of the female body. Deena is an evolutionary geneticist, author, and teacher. Her new book explores the mysteries of the female body through an evolutionary lens. She's a PhD from Yale and a senior scientist in the Center for Reproductive longevity and equality at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Her research draws on her evolutionary background and expertise on female reproduction to investigate the evolution of menopause. Her new book explores menstruation, the mammary gland, pregnancy, orgasm, menopause, and focuses not simply on what these functions and traits are, but why they exist. If you enjoy unraveling good mysteries, are excited by history, science, health, if you want to be smarter about your own body and how it came to evolve over time, stick around this show is for you. Welcome Deena.
Deena Emera 1:37
Thank you so much. What a lovely introduction. I am so excited to be here.
Katie Fogarty 1:41
Well, I'm so excited to have you. I have thoroughly enjoyed this book, you take very complicated topics, very complicated, you know, sort of genetic and science terms and really translate them in a way that makes it so accessible, so engaging, highly readable, I'm really enjoying the book. So I want to start with some stage setting, what made you decide to write a brief history of the female body?
Deena Emera 2:05
Oh, gosh, that's a good question, and that I need to rewind in my life to get you to, to answer that question. So I have a PhD, you mentioned that in your nice introduction. My PhD was on the evolution of pregnancy. And I was, you know, the first, you know, I'm, I'm an evolutionary biologist, and we were really interested in how things evolve in nature, or how body parts evolve. And so the lab that I was working in, was interested in how pregnancy evolved, you know, humans and all mammals, well, most mammals actually get pregnant, and they, you know, develop their babies inside their bodies, the first mammals laid eggs. And so we were interested in how that happened, sort of at the genetic level. And at the level of, you know, organs and tissues, and the mom and the baby. Anyway, so this is, you know, for me, like a fascinating question. And, as I was, you know, studying for my qualifying exams, you know, you have to do a lot of research and reading when you're sort of defending your ideas to a committee who's going to let you do your PhD work. Anyway, as all that was happening, I was pregnant with my first baby. And it was just a surreal experience for me. I, you know, I feel like, you know, in many stages of our life, we're going through, you know, pregnancy is, incredible, scary, wonderful. I mean, you know, you feel all the emotions, and your body's going through all this crazy stuff. And, you know, you're, I guess, told by your doctor, what's happening and what to expect, but there's just so much that's deeper there. And I feel like the average person who hasn't gotten a PhD like on the evolution of pregnancy, as an example, just never learns about what's happening in their body. So that was, you know, the idea was that and I was like, wow, I think other women would be really interested in, you know, the context behind why we experienced pregnancy the way that we do. And you know, that baby that I was pregnant with is now. he just turned 14. So it was a while ago. And I've since studied many other aspects of our biology of female biology. And so, of course, the book is not just about pregnancy, that's one component. I talk about a lot of other interesting puzzling aspects of our biology like periods like breasts, like menopause. So it's,
Katie Fogarty 4:55
It's such that you really cover such a wide spectrum of you know what happens physiologically to, or can happen physiologically because not everyone has a child, to women or as you say, you know, people who are born with ovaries, but we're recording this during world menopause month. In fact, you know, world menopause day is is a few days out from this recording session. So I'd love it if we could start there. Right? The evolution of menopause is obviously a very big topic. But maybe we can start with a very simple question. Why do women experience menopause but not men?
Deena Emera 5:29
I love this question.
Katie Fogarty 5:30
And maybe Ii's not that simple. Men are fertile forever. But women's fertility has it has an expiration date? Why?
Deena Emera 5:41
Yeah, absolutely. And it's, oh, my gosh, it is can be really frustrating for women who maybe are trying to have kids later in their life. And then, of course, I'm sure that, you know, you've talked about this on your show, once a woman goes through menopause, you know, that triggers sort of a cascade of, you know, concerning health issues, because our reproductive hormones decline. So yes, it's not really not just about fertility, it's, it's about our health. And so why, why do we have to go through this and not men? And I actually think we have a pretty good answer to that question. And it all has to do with when, you know, females and males make their I call them gametes, but essentially, that's their sex cells, their eggs and their sperm. And, you know, so you may or may not realize that females make all of their eggs before they're even born. You know, we are at the sort of peak we make, humans, make about six or 7 million eggs, that's at 20 weeks of fetal development. When we're born, that number has dwindled to like a million. And over the course of our lives, we're losing hundreds, thousands of eggs a month. So it's not just about the one egg or maybe two eggs if, if you're having twins, it's not just about that one or two eggs that get ovulated we're losing thousands of eggs. And if we have time, we can talk about what we think is happening to those eggs. But you know, essentially, what happens is that we run out of eggs, around the time of menopause. It's not exactly right, like, are usually around the time of menopause, you have less than a thousand eggs. And that may sounds like a lot. But we need like this threshold number of eggs to like keep our reproductive cycles going. And at about a thousand, that's just not enough. So this is very different from the situation in men. In men, they've got these stem cells, and we had those stem cells too, but basically, they didn't stick around after we were born. But males, the stem cells are alive and well throughout their life. And you know, stem cells basically allow men to just continue making sperm. And so that is sort of the the short answer. It's this very different strategy that males and females use. And this is not just humans, this is you know, all male animals have these stem cells. So you know, this is across the board. This is how males make their sex cells. All mammals, all female mammals and birds make this stockpile of eggs up front, which is weird, because it sets you up for menopause.
Katie Fogarty 8:44
But humans are only, I learned this from your book. And I've actually read this in an articles, humans are one of the only you know the few mammals that actually experience menopause in midlife. I think others are different whales. So why are humans experiencing...yhy are humans one of the lucky few mammals along with our friends, the whales to experience menopause? Deena, we're heading into a quick break when we come back, let's let's pick this question up.
Deena Emera 9:09
Absolutely.
Katie Fogarty 9:11
Deea, we're back from the break. And I asked you a very big question as we headed into it. And you know, I know that you have some theories. Why are humans one of the few mammals to experience menopause in midlife?
Deena Emera 9:24
Yeah, so you know what you mentioned before the break is that it's us and a few whales. Those whales are, they're all toothed whales. So it's beluga whales, narwhal orcas, and short finned pilot whales. There may be more that we don't know about. This is obviously difficult to study in, especially in animals that are swimming in the oceans. And so we know the most about orcas, orcas have a lifespan very similar to humans. And it's also similar to human females, they stop having babies in their 40s. So they are spending like half of their life in sort of this post menopausal state that is really weird. So yes, we're not the only ones. But the vast majority of animals don't go through menopause, they basically their reproductive systems slow down. As do you know, male reproductive systems, you know, it's much harder for a man to reproduce very late in life. But, you know, his reproductive system sort of aging at the same rate at other as other,
Katie Fogarty 10:44
Body systems, right?
Deena Emera 10:46
Other body systems, exactly. other organs, other tissues, whereas in women, you know, I'm 46, my ovaries are basically dying right now. And, and that's very different from the rest of my body, you know, I feel sort of not at my peak, but like, I feel great.
Katie Fogarty 11:04
You know, and you will live to 46, most likely, you know, there's women live way beyond their their menopausal cycles. And so it's, there's so many interesting hypotheses, I would love for you to share them with our listeners.
Deena Emera 11:18
Yeah. So I would say one of the most well known hypotheses is the grandmother hypothesis. And so this is a hypothesis, it's really not about why we go through menopause when we do, it's more about why we live so long beyond menopause. And so, you know, the first part of that statement, you know, what's interesting about humans and our closest animal relatives, which are chimpanzees is that they go through menopause around the same time as we do. The big difference between humans and chimps is that we're living decades beyond that age. And so, you know, the folks who came up with the grandmother hypothesis that was actually proposed many, many decades ago. But it was really sort of elaborated on and described in a lot of detail by this anthropologist, a female anthropologist, Kristin Hawkes, and she was working with this tribe in East Africa, the Hodza. And what she noticed with the Hodza, is that the grandmas play a really important role in their communities. So basically, they help, they have a very unique diet involving these, like sweet potatoes, essentially, that need to get dug up, they need to get cut up, they need to get cooked. And the grandmas are doing all of that work. And they're helping feed their daughters children. And so I think her work with the Hodza is really what helped her develop this idea that humans started living longer. And this we don't know exactly when this was, it could have been tens of thousands hundreds of thousands, even millions of years ago. And what she suggested is that there were some sort of environmental ecological challenges at some point, you know, in the past, and this new behavior on the part of grandmothers started evolving, where they were starting to, you know, be more involved in family life, because you know, when you look at, obviously, humans are a very social species. We live, at least in the past, we lived in these close family communities. That's not true of other primates. You know, chimpanzees, it's childcare is all on the mom. She's doing everything. And so that, you know, was the idea behind this hypothesis that humans started living longer because this new behavior emerged. And so these grandmothers who weren't, they were postmenopausal, they had already experienced menopause. That's something that we inherited, again, according to the hypothesis, that's something we inherited from our primate relatives. And, but what was new was this new behavior of grandmothers starting to play a, you know, a bigger role in family life. Having,
Katie Fogarty 14:29
Deena, could the converse be true? That grandma started playing a bigger role in family life because they live longer?
Deena Emera 14:36
Yeah, so that's part of the, you know, the challenge with this hypothesis is what came first. And, you know, we don't really know and some of the sort of criticisms of the hypothesis are exactly that, that, you know, if if humans hadn't already started to live longer, you know, and I'm not gonna get into the math, but you know, evolution really requires large numbers, you need a lot of people or a lot of, you know, organisms, sort of, you know, engaging in some new behavior or, you know. So some people have argued: no people, humans started living longer for other reasons. And that opened up the possibility for grandmothers to start caring for their grandchildren. We don't know. I mean, this was a long time ago. So we don't have an answer to that. But absolutely, yes, like it could have been flipped. But the idea that really, the idea here is that grandmothers were not having their own kids, but they were having more grandkids because of this new behavior, right. So you've got these grandmas, they're helping feed their grandchildren, so more of their grandchildren are surviving. Some other grandmas aren't doing that. And because they don't, they're not, they don't have new behavior or sort of, you know, they're not engaging, engaging in a yet. And so, you know, the grandmothers who were doing, you know, you know, at, more engaged in their communities, helping their grandchildren, they were essentially propagating those genes involved in those behaviors. And that is how it sort of became a human trait.
Katie Fogarty 16:18
Interesting, and your book does such a great job of explaining, you know, what evolution is and how long it takes for evolution to actually impact how our genes change, and differ and evolve to create these sort of new traits. So this might be a good time to sort of segue into a question that I actually have, and that I've seen in news, and I know, that's being explored by companies, you know, do we need menopause, you know, get given all the health impacts that occur, which had been covered, I've done probably 27 shows on menopause. And we know that it increases the rates of osteoporosis and, and, you know, potentially dementia and cardiac impacts in women, not to mention all of the just sort of everyday quality of life impacts that can come along with like painful sex and dry vagina and bladder leakage. And, you know, any one of the 34 symptoms, you know, it produces all of these very, very huge health impacts, you know, do we need menopause, can we evolve away from it. What do you think?
Deena Emera 17:24
I think that's a great question. And I think there is a lot of interest, I mean, my own work, right now, it the research that I'm doing has been funded by this. It's called the Global Consortium for Reproductive Longevity and Equality. And, you know, the goal is to delay or cancel menopause. Because it's not only about fertility, it's really mainly about health. And, you know, women have options now, you know, they can take hormone replacement therapy. But, you know, it's an imperfect and limited set of choices that we have. And so, you know, from the evolutionary perspective, you know, we'll menopause of all the way, you know, on its own, you know, evolution happens on very long timescales, there is actually evidence that not just the age of menopause, but also the age that we hit puberty, there is evidence that sort of our reproductive lifespans has been getting a teeny, teeny tiny, tiny bit longer over, you know, the last couple hundred years. But we're talking, you know, on the order of days or weeks, sure, and that's not something that, you know, in our lifetimes, or our daughter's lifetimes, really makes a big difference. So, you know, I think the question is more, are interventions, you know, medical interventions to delay menopause, do those make sense? Are those going to be safe? You know, are we like playing with nature? And I would say, my goodness, you know, when our bodies evolved, we were living in a very different contexts. And, you know, there are many examples where, you know, clearly the way that our bodies evolved, don't match well, doesn't match well with the way that you know, we're living now.
Katie Fogarty 19:32
Well, you make that you make that case in the book, which I thought was so fascinating, and I frequent listeners know I say this regularly, I learned something new on every show. And I'm gonna say that today is absolutely no exception. Because in prepping for this podcast, I learned that 80% of all autoimmune cases are found in women, right? Female bodies have evolved to fall prey to these notoriously difficult disorders to treat, right? Can you share that, and that, that this really illustrates the point you just made, that the bodies that we have today are not the same as the bodies that we started with, you know, back in history before evolution, can you share with our listeners what I'm trying to ask you about?
Deena Emera 20:15
Yeah, absolutely. Well, the issue is that our bodies are very similar, but our environments are not, and really evolution. You know, we think about it being all about our genes, but really, it's this interplay between our genes and our environment. And so, you know, our genes are not like, you know, super prescriptive, where if you have this gene, this thing is going to happen. No, it's not like that it our genes are more flexible than that, where they they sort of say, well, if the conditions are this, do this, if the conditions are, you know, Y, do this. So it's, the key here is that our environments are very different. Which is why, for example, you know, we see, so many people have problems with their weights. Obviously, when humans are, we're evolving tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years ago, you know, food was not always there. And so the way that our body stores energy as fat, metabolizes energy, it all has to do with, you know, the conditions that people were finding food back in the day. So on the auto, autoimmune diseases, oh, my gosh, I find this topic so interesting. These are definitely diseases of the modern worlds, you know, our ancestors were not suffering from autoimmune disorders. And there are a lot of ideas on why I talk in my book about the one that I find most interesting and compelling, which is that humans in the past were always infected with parasitic worms, and today, in most places in the world are not. And, you know, I don't need to go deep into this hypothesis. It's called the old friends hypothesis. But, you know, the basic idea is that our immune systems essentially evolved to be dealing constantly with parasitic worm infections. And, you know, so, you know, we,
Katie Fogarty 22:15
In the absence of these we create, I guess, these autoimmune disorders.
Deena Emera 22:21
Exactly, our immune systems, you know, in the absence of these sort of old friends in quotes, because, you know, worm infections can be really nasty...
Katie Fogarty 22:32
It's a little tongue in cheek, I guess.
Deena Emera 22:36
But, you know, they are secreting all of these anti-inflammatory signals to our bodies, because you know, worms don't want your immune system to kick them out, they obviously want to live in your body for a long haul, because that's how they'll have more of their own babies. And so they secrete all these molecules that basically suppress our immune systems. And our immune systems are kind of expecting that, because that's how they evolved, they logged evolved alongside these worms. And so when we remove them, our immune systems freak out. And there's a lot of other things going on. That's not I don't think this is the only explanation. For an example, why does it hit women harder than men? Because it does, 80% of all autoimmune cases are found in women, which is just, you know, insane, that you find something that lopsided. And I think a big part of the answer just has to do with the way that the female and male immune systems are, like the way they evolved, females tend to have much stronger, faster acting immune systems in general, than men. And, you know, there's all sorts of data to support that. One example I give in my book is on COVID. You know, very early on before vaccines, and you know, before we knew a lot about, you know, how COVID infects the body and whatnot, it was clear that it was COVID was hitting men harder than women. And it's, this is not the only disease where that occurs. And essentially, you know, what we think is happening is that the female immune system is just better at, it's just better. And I think a lot of that has to do with the way our reproductive systems have evolved. A lot of it comes back to reproductive hormones. So estrogen is really, you know, a friendly hormone for our immune systems, whereas testosterone, you know, is great for other things, but not great for the male immune system.
Katie Fogarty 24:43
It just goes back to the importance of estrogen for the female body, which is so, which, and it walks out the door during menopause and we're left for you know, 30 to 40 years without it suffering sort of its impact. You know, I'm fascinated by what you shared about longevity? You know, it feels like, you know, menopause might be the, I don't want to say red herring, but it's you know, the longevity seems to be where the rubber is hitting the road here...Where we made changes to the not just the length of our reproductive health, but to our genes, where we're just living longer. And that's been changed by society by modern medicine, by antibiotics, by better nutrition, by external factors, too. I know you said the evolutionary landscape is long. But, you know, why is it, why do men, you know, why are they not impacted in the same way? We clearly have a longer lifespan than we did in the past. Why do you feel that women sort of get the short end of the stick once we do sort of pass our reproductive years?
Deena Emera 25:59
Yeah, it's really interesting. There's a famous quote, I'm not going to remember who said it, but it was something along the lines of females get sicker, but males die quicker. And, you know, it's this sort of, puzzle that, you know, we do know that women on average, live longer than men. Now, in the past, females tend to live longer. And a lot of it has to do with, you know, the protective effects of some of these reproductive hormones. And, but at the same time, especially once we go through menopause, we suffer a lot. So we're, we're living, but we, we get sick, we, you know, the, you know, the second half of our life is just, you know, full of, you know, inconvenient symptoms, but also, you know, really concerning diseases and disorders, again, all tied to menopause. I mean, that's really the turning point, I think in a woman's, turning point in terms of her health.
Katie Fogarty 27:16
Well, you know, we live in, we live in a moment of time that feels very fortunate in some way, because there are so many advances in what's being offered to women in terms of strategies and products. And, you know, we're coming out of sort of a dark period where the Women's Health Initiative of 20 years ago has been, you know, is being somewhat reevaluated in terms of what is being offered to women in terms of hormone replacement therapy. There are brands, businesses, telehealth trying to step into the breach that was created by the, you know, misinterpretation of that particular study. So I feel somewhat optimistic. And I wonder if you, you share that attitude?
Deena Emera 28:04
Absolutely. I think, I mean, I think that hopefully, the momentum continues, but definitely there has been this shift in the conversation about women's health, and I think it's, it's wonderful, and it's long overdue, right. And I, I think that we're at this point where women are demanding more choices, better, better options...
Katie Fogarty 28:32
And demanding more of our government, because the Menopause Research Equity Act is, you know, once again, before Congress, and you know, you can reach out to your own elected officials to figure out where they stand on that topic. You know, research is so important, because menopause is still misunderstood in terms of how it impacts all of our different health systems. And any kind of effective strategies and treatment really require a bedrock understanding of the actual science of what happens to women's bodies when they go through this. So, you know, I'm optimistic as well, because that hopefully is going to be another turning point. Deena, I wonder if we can switch gears for a minute now because we've been talking about menopause, which has sort of pros and cons for women, but I would love to talk about something. I know your book really looks at the full spectrum. It's pregnancy, it's mammary glands, it's menstruation, all of these things that all of my listeners have experienced at one point, you know, potentially in the past, but this is something you do explore a topic that hopefully is a big part of women's lives today and going forward for their lifespan and that is orgasm. So I would love for you...I think we can all understand, even if we're not scientists, why we have mammary glands that are used to feed offspring. But other biological occurrences are perhaps more perplexing, right? You know, what is the science and evolutionary purpose of the orgasm?
Deena Emera 29:59
Oh, yeah, that is a huge question. It is an awesome, fascinating question. And probably one of the more controversial topics that I researched for my book, it turns out that my PhD advisor investigated this very recently. So it's partly why I got so interested in the question. And there's no consensus. So I would say, you know, I described this in, you know, that chapter on orgasms. There's sort of two main ideas on the female orgasm. There's no question about male orgasm, why males had orgasms, because they're directly tied to sperm release. You know, a male, not just a human, but all male land animals really need to have an orgasm to release their sperm. So obviously, a trait like that is going to be under strong natural selection. You know, if you don't have an orgasm, you can't have babies. And so there's no question about why men and why males have orgasms. But the question is, why do females have orgasms? And again, here, I'm not just talking about human women, but other species, we're pretty sure, after a lot of research, other female animals do have the capacity to experience orgasm and do experience them, we don't know exactly how they experience them, but they're experiencing them. And so two big ideas. One is that they exist by accident. And, you know, very quickly...
Katie Fogarty 31:41
oh my god, I'm dying.
Deena Emera 31:44
This is where if we were on video, I would whip out my 3d printed model that I've gotten on Etsy, the humane clitoris, and I have it in like very bright colors. So if you look at the anatomy of the clitoris, and the anatomy of the penis, they're basically the same structure just organized, I mean, not even organized differently, but you know, they look different. But if you go back in time to when an egg is fertilized, and you know that embryo is developing, during embryonic development, you know, what you will notice is that males and females really start off identical. And even, you know, the genital region, sort of where the future clitoris and penis will develop, that region looks identical, the tissues start to develop in an identical way. And the turning point is when a baby male starts making testosterone and the females not making testosterone in large amounts. And so, the penis sort of develops differently. It's obviously most, it's an external structure. And that's not the case for most of the clitoris and women, but when you look at the tissues they are the same, same muscles, same nervous system, sort of tissues, there's this spongy tissue in there. So it's, it's the same. And so you know, the idea is, because of that shared development really early on, and because men need, males, excuse me need to have orgasms. It just sort of happens in women and females as sort of a byproduct of what needs to be happening in males. If that makes sense.
Katie Fogarty 33:37
It's absolutely so fascinating. Your book is full of information that I had no idea, I so enjoyed reading it, it's you know, it's from breast to what I said earlier, mammary glands, but you have a really interesting explanation about how even breasts have changed beyond simply its function of feeding offspring. And it's evolved to become something that is, you know, makes you attractive, and attracts mates. And it just, it was really so interesting to read, I learned so much I found the book to be hugely, hugely enjoyable and so readable, which it's such a testament to your skill as a writer, because it's very hard to take very complicated topics and make them so digestible and fun to read. So I truly recommend "A Brief History of the Female Body," for anyone who has one, or loves somebody who does, it was totally fascinating. Deena we're moving into our speed round because we're nearing the end of our time together. This is just quick one to two word answers. So we can you know, get a little bit more from you before we have to say goodbye. Are you ready?
Deena Emera 34:52
I'm ready.
Katie Fogarty 34:53
Let's do it. Okay, this is fun. It's easy. People get stressed out sometimes. Okay. Writing "A Brief History of the Female Body," was:
Deena Emera 35:04
Fun.
Katie Fogarty 35:05
The first time you saw your book on a store shelf, it felt:
Deena Emera 35:10
Thrilling.
Katie Fogarty 35:11
I bet. What is anything that surprised you in researching this book?
Deena Emera 35:20
How little women know.
Katie Fogarty 35:22
Yes. Okay, I can hear that. Yeah. Our biological makeup is an important predictor of whether or not we become sick. But we can influence this with our lifestyle choices. What's a healthy lifestyle choice or hack that you make in your own life?
Deena Emera 35:39
Walking outside.
Katie Fogarty 35:40
Nice. A longevity choice you make in your own life?
Deena Emera 35:48
Sleeping?
Katie Fogarty 35:49
Yes, totally sleep is so important. Okay, this is not really a question, but it's more of a suggestion. Okay. Let me frame it as a question. Have you thought about creating a young readers' version of this book?
Deena Emera 36:03
Oh, no. But that's a great idea.
Katie Fogarty 36:06
I totally can see this being something that, that kids should read when they're younger. Because even though it's very readable, it's still geared towards adults, so I guess so put that in your put that button in the back of your brain for somewhere. I think it could really be such a valuable resource. Okay, finally, your one word answer to complete the sentence. As I age I feel:
Deena Emera 36:30
Beautiful.
Katie Fogarty 36:31
Nice. Oh, my gosh, I love it. What a fantastic, fantastic note to end on. I love it. Deena, before we say goodbye, how can our listeners keep following you, your work? I know you write on all sorts of fascinating topics, and how can they find this book?
Deena Emera 36:45
Yes. Well, you can find the book anywhere that you buy books. Obviously Amazon, Barnes and Noble. You can find me and links to all those places to get my book on my websites. It's just my name DeenaEmera.com. I'm on Instagram. I'm on LinkedIn. If you want to find me there. I am on Twitter, although I think or whatever it's called. Now, I think I will not be on that for long because it is just so toxic. But...
Katie Fogarty 37:13
I will put all of that in the show notes. listeners can find that on the website and they can continue to follow you and your work. Thank you Deena,
Deena Emera 37:19
Thank you for having me. I loved this. It was so much fun.
Katie Fogarty 37:22
It was great. This wraps A Certain Age, a show for women who are aging without apology, and before I say goodbye - a quick favor. I would love it. If you could take five minutes to write an Apple Podcast review. Did you learn something on today's show? Do you feel smarter, more inspired or more connected to a tribe of amazing midlife women? If so, I would love and appreciate hearing your thinking in an Apple Podcast review. Rating and reviewing these shows is so simple to do. It only takes a few minutes, and reviews help the show grow. Special thanks to Michael Mancini who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time and until then, age boldly beauties.