“If you ignore the feelings for long enough, what might they curdle into?”

Sam Beckbessinger is the author of the bestselling Manage Your Money Like a Fucking Grownup and the novel Girls of Little Hope (co-authored with Dale Halvorsen). Her interactive story about climate change, Survive the Century, was featured in New Scientist and Gizmodo. She teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University, writes kids’ TV and picture books, once wrote for Marvel, and is weirdly obsessed with spreadsheets. Her perimenopausal werewolf novel Femme Feral is coming in summer 2026. She grew up on a farm near Durban with a pet donkey named Mr Magoo, but now lives in London.

As a woman, when you go to the Doctor, google symptoms, talk to anyone (even vaguely) about your body and about what your body may be doing (or not doing) you will invariably be told ‘it is normal’ or ‘it is your hormones.’ In pain? Normal. Trouble sleeping? Normal. Feel really bloated but apparently lost weight? Normal. Want to rip the throat out of every stupid horrible person who has irritated you today…?… Normal. Wake up in blood splattered chaos with half a dead dog in your bathtub, blood on your hands, and totally naked…. Normal? No matter the obscure, odd or downright inexplicable, you are certainly going to get the vacant clouded eyes, meaningless smile, false empathetic energy and condescending tone that you always hear. ‘Totally normal.’ 

‘Ah, but there are over two hundred potential symptoms of perimenopause, nothing to worry about, according to the unhelpfully cheerful menopause app on my phone, which I have thrown against the wall several times.’

‘Probably Perimenopause could be the title of my memoir at this point’

There is a loneliness that comes with female suffering. Managing any number of personal, private bodily things that are ‘normal,’ but impact everyone differently. Regardless of how these bodily functions affect us, we are expected to carry on and hide the struggle. Even though ‘wellness,’ ‘mental health,’ and ‘wellbeing’ is being shouted from every window society can open, even when you reach out for support for what ails you, the loneliness persists, as you inevitably get the vacant GP who is clock watching for their next patient, the friends who raise an eyebrow and the mother in law who says ‘get on with it.’ The body is complicated, the female body is not only complex, but also misunderstood, overlooked and marginalized by medicine and society. So, if you were turning into a werewolf, you would probably be told that your symptoms were normal and expected to just get on with it. 

  ‘I sometimes wonder, was it me? Did I make womanhood look so unappealing that she chose to destroy herself rather than grow into a woman’s body?’

Ellie, Beckbessinger’s protagonist, is the absolute epitome of a woman who has been marginalised and packaged into a particular box by those around her. She is a mother, a wife, a carer and an extremely hard worker who keeps the company she works for going (a ‘wellness’ app, ironically), even whilst the men around her seem to float about using commercial buzz words like ‘innovation’ and blowing budgets on bullshit marketing. Ellie admits that this isn’t the life she would have chosen for herself, saying “I slipped into heterosexuality like a comfortable pair of slippers.” She conforms to the role she thinks she should play and is continuously left feeling overlooked, small and inadequate, although she knows she isn’t.

“There’s this proverb: The sheep spends its whole life fearing the wolf, only to be eaten by the   shepherd, Women are trained to fear some strange man in an alley, but what really gets us? The home-making. The care work. The emotional labour. Martyring ourselves until we’re too tired to think about what we want. What kills us isn’t the man in the alley, it’s the slow, psychic death of trying to make ourselves small enough to be good.”

When Ellie’s boss announces he is stepping away from the company, everyone expects she will be made CEO, she will finally receive the recognition she deserves, and all her hard work will finally pay off. Sadly. She is passed over for a man who has never worked in the industry. But instead of getting angry and smashing things, Ellie feels unwell and passes out. Finds herself at the GP, and told she has probably reached the perimenopause.

“I kept wanting to say, stop, this joke has got out of hand, because how absurd, to find yourself suddenly someone’s mother, suddenly someone’s wife, like some 1950s sitcom.”

Alongside the story of Ellie, we are also introduced to an elderly woman named Brenda, who is marginalized in her own way. Lonely in her little flat that she can’t afford, caring for her neighbour’s cat (because the neighbour died), and she has just been told by her only living relative (her beloved niece) that she isn’t invited to Christmas that year. She’s the embodiment of an irate and grumpy old lady, who some may perceive as rude in her blunt and impatient way, and now, someone has murdered her cat. 

“Death is loneliness. Death is only yourself, your own terrible self.”

Brenda’s need to solve the mystery slowly becomes her obsession/hobby – who killed her cat? She set’s up Facebook pages, calls the police, and rampages around to try and find the murderer. This story line echoes of the Croydon Cat Killer of 2015, where cats were turning up mutilated, investigated and examined, with 6 necropsy outcomes stating ‘suspicious’ deaths. The Met worked with RSPCA and Croydon-based group South Norwood Animal Rescue Liberty (aptly named Snarl), to try and find the culprit, but it was blamed on foxes in the end. Brenda and her gang of vigilante investigators(other owners of recently mutilated cats) who she meets on Facebook, begin demanding action by the police and asking the vet to look at the bodies, eventually being laughed at, ignored, or flatly told to stop. Brenda’s concerns are ignored and ridiculed by everyone who could actually help her.

“The whole night is alive. Hungry for me.”

Femme Feral, looks not only at the marginalised woman, but also considered anyone who may be overlooked, diminished or misunderstood and those who may be ‘harder to love’ at times. Those who suffer with mental health and eating disorders, those being carved away by cancer, those who are old and lonely, those going through changes, and those who suffer conditions that change their behaviour and memory. 

‘He’s still himself in the daytime, clever and kind. But there’s a quick unravelling after sunset, his kindness flaking off like a sunburn to reveal raw red panic underneath. He becomes a different person then, someone harder to love.’

‘The mental health crisis isn’t a mental health crisis, it’s a symptom of the broken world, the poly- crisis, the omnishambles.’

Whilst I enjoyed this book, very much, the energy in the pages sent white hot rage through me. The reminisent pangs of sexist f***s who have degraded, demoralized, gaslit, belittled, misjudged, abused and patronized me for simply being female…. when someone assumes your disillusion or disgruntled attitude about something is caused by hormones: eg: ‘are you on the blob?’ or  

  ‘‘You know what this is, right?’ He places gentle hands on my shoulders. ‘This is the menopause talking.’

“AAAHHHHHH” I instantly hated Ellie’s husband. Anyway, as much as I wanted to punch certain charcters in the face, through the page, I enjoyed the anger. I felt vindicated and seen. But, Sam Beckbessinger broke the rules. NEVER. HURT. THE. DOG. As soon as someone hurts/kills a dog in a book – we have a problem.  I’m also quite shocked at some of the similarities to my own life that leaked out of the narrative, potentially why I felt such an emotional connection to Ellie (my best friends name), Brenda (my mothers name), all the animals (because who doesn’t love all the floofs), the GP’s attitude towards Ellie (every GP ever when I go about Endometriosis), family members being miserable because that is their only reason for living (my nan – RIP) and the existential terror and realisation that the world is knackered and there is nothing we can do about it… 

‘You never met a woman more committed to her own misery than my mother.’

  ‘The family therapist told us: that the world is ending and she’s helpless to stop it. And it’s hard talk a child out of a fear you all secretly believe is probably entirely rational. ‘

Beckbessinger has extracted all the pent-up rage, frustration and injustice the world stirs into your life and mixed it into an angry, feminist, horror laden rage fantasy that is hilarious, savage and strangely stimulating. I laughed, I cried, and I howled, but I guess that was the intention – right? 

I’ll be recommending this book to all my mum friends, and my mums friends. 

Femme Feral is due for release on 9th April – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org