Guest post written by The Glowing Life of Leeann Wu author Mindy Hung
Mindy Hung is a former health/medical editor whose work has appeared in the New York Post, Bitch, and The New York Times, among others. She writes romance as Ruby Lang and Opal Wei and was a 2010 fiction fellow for the New York Foundation for the Arts. She and her family are recent transplants to Toronto.
About The Glowing Life of Leeann Wu: A seemingly inexplicable magic takes over the lives of three generations of women in this gripping and romantically steamy novel sure to captivate readers of At the Coffee Shop of Curiosities and The Change.
The Glowing Life of Leeann Wu, my new novel about a 40-something midwife whose hands inexplicably begin to luminesce, started its life with a literal flash of inspiration—a hot flash, that is.
For a long time, I’d wanted to write a witchy, generational book, but when I thought of what kind of power that Leeann, my main character, would manifest, I drew a blank. Because as someone who, like Leeann, was in her forties and dealing with motherhood and ageing parents and an increasingly unruly body, I didn’t feel powerful. Quite the opposite.
When I experienced my first hot flash in 2019. I awoke drenched in sweat and thought I was having heart palpitations. After a visit to urgent care where doctors gave me an ECG, I was told aside from elevated blood pressure (fair considering how stressed I was) things looked normal.
I did not feel normal.
When I finally figured out what that I was going through perimenopause, it was a relief, but I was also really, really angry, because, among other things, it seemed like such a profound waste of all of that power. In the middle of experiencing some of my symptoms, the hot flashes, the anxiety, the shortness of temper, It seemed like I had more energy than it was possible for my body to contain, like I was a bomb waiting to explode. I asked myself, what if that power could be something else?
It was then that I understood what could happen to Leeann, what it felt like to be overwhelmed, not just with new feelings in her own once-familiar skin, but with how it felt on top of all that was happening in her life: Leeann’s daughter was off to university at the end of summer, she had a difficult relationship with her ob/gyn mother and she had attracted the admiration of a younger man. Leeann’s hands were already full, and now she had this glow she didn’t understand or even want.
The Glowing Life of Leeann Wu wasn’t a story about perimenopause, but it was strongly informed by it; It was about being a certain age and having to deal with the power and the weirdness of living in a 40-something body while dealing with a changing identity and a new role in life.
Since writing this book, I’ve since enjoyed a handful of books that deal with a magical midlife, including Kristen Miller’s The Change for example, and I love them all. I love belonging to a generation of women who can rework the discomfort (and sometimes-indignity) and strangeness of this riot of hormones into something amazing, that in our hot flashes, we’ve been able to transform our stories so that we’re not old and helpless, but powerful.
