Mariella Frostrup is hot. I mean temperature-wise, although, in fairness, she does look the picture of attractive good health, beaming if perspiring slightly, in the kitchen of her Somerset home deep in the verdant English countryside. The 62-year-old broadcaster, journalist and menopause campaigner is on a video call when she declares herself to be overheating. I ask if she’s having a hot flush, a valid question, seeing as how for the last 12 years she’s been on a crusade to widen the conversation around the menopause and advocate for women in midlife. “I’ve only had two flushes in my life and I’m extremely glad about that, because we had one woman get in touch with us who was having 50 a day and, oh my God, trying to do her job, it was unbelievably hard.”
She’s on the call to discuss her new book, Menolicious, a book of recipes for menopausal women written with Belles Berry, the daughter of food author and TV presenter Mary Berry. Frostrup is known for many things across a career of more than 40 years in British media. Having spent most of her childhood in Ireland – we’ll come to that later – she left for London, where her distinctive broadcasting voice and telegenic looks led the Daily Mail to breathlessly brand her “the brazen husky” at one point. She has worked for newspapers, including the Guardian and the Mail on Sunday, hosted radio shows such as Open Book on BBC Radio 4, and featured in arts, current affairs and travel television shows. She was the Observer’s wise and brilliant agony aunt for two decades.
Her latest role, as menopause advocate, was born of rage. Reaching the end of her 40s, having had two children at age 42 and 43 with her husband, human rights lawyer Jason McCue, she experienced a downturn in her health. “I’d been aloft on a sea of happy hormones for a few years and then I had this crash and I had absolutely no idea what was going on,” she recalls. “I had insomnia and terrible anxiety and it took about two years to diagnose.” It was an Irish woman gynaecologist who identified her menopausal symptoms. “Finally, so many things made sense, but I was so angry that something that was going to happen to every single woman was such a shameful secret, because by then my curiosity had me bringing it up at dinner parties and talking about it in broadcasts, and every time it was deemed this shocking thing to be talking about.”
When she began to look into the topic, she discovered a myriad of injustices. “There are 13 million women in the UK at the moment going through their menopausal period and they’ve varying degrees of knowledge about what’s happening to them, most of it very minimal. Then we have a medical profession that seems equally ignorant ... This changing period of our lives is not even deemed worthy of doctors studying it. Menopause wasn’t a mandatory topic, you could just do a half-hour thing on it in a seven-year medical degree. And it just felt so wrong.”
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She says she didn’t stop to think how becoming Mariella the menopause campaigner might impact on her career. “I’m not very good at thinking before I speak, so I just went for it.” She made a BBC documentary in 2018, The Truth About The Menopause, and then in 2022 founded Menopause Mandate with Davina McCall and Penny Lancaster, campaigning for greater awareness. Last year, she was appointed the UK government’s menopause employment ambassador.
How has she found the role as government adviser? “Really interesting,” she says. “I’m learning the art of diplomacy and patience, neither of which are particularly my superpowers ... there is a lot of goodwill, because the economic imperative is so clear. If you don’t facilitate women at the height of their career expertise and professional abilities, if you don’t support them, then you’re the loser. The statistics and the data prove that. So I’m kind of not having to argue the case as heavily as I thought I’d have to.”
She prefers to see her brief as being about women’s general health in the workplace. “I think what we have to really do is look at workplaces as a sort of holistic whole and understand that they’ve been built entirely on the experience of the male of the species, and that is not to denigrate men, but it’s a fact. Until after the second World War, men were mainly the ones who went out to work for power and kudos and money, and we stayed at home and worked for no power and no kudos and no money. And the world has changed, thank God. The economy needs us all to play an active part in it. So I think that the argument is about reshaping workplaces for everyone who works in them. And that might mean someone who has other challenges. It means women going through the many turbulent phases that fertility brings, whether you’re trying to get pregnant, whether you’ve miscarried, whether you’ve got endometriosis.”
She had a period recently, “due to my own foolish mistake on my HRT consumption”. It was her first period in 12 years. “And oh, my God, was it a grim reminder of what I’d lived through for 40 years, every month pretending everything was fine, panicking every time I needed to change my tampon. I was mortified to buy tampons in the shop, I used to hide them under packets of cornflakes. You know, all of the indignities forced on women because our bodies are deemed to be shameful and not celebrated. I think it’s a really seismic societal shift that has to happen. It’s not going to happen overnight, but I’m hoping to entice supporters along the way and get there in the end.”
Her menopause advocacy is something she can’t seem to quit. “The last 12 years have been some of the most rewarding of my life but also some of the most surprising. And every time I think I’m going to stop, that I’m done with this, I can’t even bear to say the word any more, then I find some other horrendous injustice, or some woman tells me a story about their experience. I still have the capacity to be shocked. But I think I’m having a last burst of activity around the topic.”
‘I’m more opportunistic than anything else. I’m fairly fearless. I don’t really care what people think of me ... I stick my neck out because I really resent the way women get judged’
This “last burst” includes Menolicious, which, she says, is not just a recipe book but a “call to arms” for all women in midlife. It’s a “survival toolkit” of quick, easy and tasty recipes to ease key symptoms of the menopause. There are kale pancakes with tahini butter described as an anti-inflammatory breakfast, lunches designed to tackle bloating, such as poached salmon with pak choi and mushrooms, and metabolism-boosting dinners such as coconut chicken and black bean stew. They won’t suit women who are unlikely to fling tahini in their shopping trolley, but the recipes were developed with a nutritionist, and the book is full of “delicious, fast and fortifying recipes to power you through midlife”, according to a blurb by actor Cate Blanchett.
Frostrup is known for having many famous friends, from George Clooney to Mick Jagger, so this celebrity endorsement is no surprise. “I went to her because she’s one of the most generous women that I’ve met at that elevated position in life ... she’s a total woman’s woman, and she’s got your back, and she’s not embarrassed or ashamed to be getting older.”
The idea for the book began when she met Belles Berry at a protest outside the Houses of Parliament in London. They were campaigning for the single one-off prescription charge for HRT. Berry told Frostrup she would love to do a cookbook but that she wasn’t good with words. A collaboration was born. “I’m a cookbook addict, you can see them all behind me,” Frostrup says, gesturing at her impressive collection. “I didn’t want to write a cookbook that was just another rod for women to beat themselves with. And Belles and I were on the same page. We wanted it to be achievable and enjoyed by all the family. You don’t want to be the person sitting on your own munching on a kale leaf. I wanted recipes women could delight in and that were achievable in terms of cooking.”
She says there are so many things that feel out of women’s hands in the menopause experience, but that nutrition is “one of the few things you can take control of ... food, diet, exercise. I’m not promising miracle cures. Nothing in this book will get rid of your hot flashes or make you as energetic as a 16-year-old. But most of the recipes can be made in under 30 minutes. One of my favourites is turmeric cauliflower, which takes 12 minutes. It’s about fuelling your body with the stuff it needs rather than the stuff you instinctively reach for. It’s galvanising.”
It’s not her first menopause-related publication. A couple of years ago, Frostrup wrote a book, Cracking The Menopause with Alice Smellie, and she has since written a theatre show of the same name, currently touring the UK. “I don’t want to spend my twilight years on stage talking about the menopause particularly, so it’s written like The Vagina Monologues in that it can be performed by other people. I’m hoping it will develop a life of its own and pop up in Australia or France or America or Dublin. Although if it goes to Dublin, I’m coming.”
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The Irish connection is strong. Frostrup was born in Oslo to Norwegian father Peter and Scottish mother Joan. She was six when her father got the job of foreign editor at The Irish Times and the family moved to Dublin for a few months and then to Kilmacanogue, to the house where Avoca handweavers is now. “We were only there a couple of years but it’s still the place I associate with home.” She describes her childhood as “peripatetic”. Her parents split up when she was eight and she attended 11 different schools, the last one was the now long-closed Sandymount High School, which she left at the age of 15.
Of the schools she attended in Ireland, she particularly remembers St Laurence College in Loughlinstown. “I had an English teacher there called Mr Murtagh who I single-handedly credit not only with inspiring my love of reading, but also for providing me with a kind of lifeline that continued through all my time in London. It was that books were a place you could go back to, a place [where] you could hide. Books were where you could learn everything. I’m an autodidact. I left school so young that everything I know about anything has come from books and that’s all down to Mr Murtagh.”
She has fond memories of Ireland, but her childhood was coloured by her parents’ unhappy marriage, their eventual split and her father’s early death. “His habits killed him, he was drinking and smoking non-stop.” She also discovered decades later, aged 50 when she went for a health check, that he must have had a genetic heart condition, which Frostrup inherited. “Of course I’m statined up the yin-yang and have hopefully a few decades in me, but he would have been unaware of his condition.”
His death when she was not yet 16 was “incredibly traumatic. It leaves you with an enormous residue of guilt, because I left him. I looked around the kitchen strewn with dirty dishes with him staring into the middle distance and realised I couldn’t cope.”
She left Dublin eight months after he died and felt guilty for years. “For a long time I felt that I should be able to save somebody. So every unlikely man who strayed across my path, I’d think, ‘Oh yeah, you’re trouble. This is going to be my life’s work’, which obviously doesn’t play out very well if you’re looking for a stable, long-term relationship. It impacted me in lots of different ways. Discovering at that age the instability of life, the preciousness of it, was in some ways a gift. I’m an atheist. I don’t think we get a second chance, so I’ve got to go for it.”
![Mariella Frostrup: 'I don’t want to spend my twilight years on stage talking about the menopause particularly, so [Menolicious] is written like The Vagina Monologues in that it can be performed by other people. I’m hoping it will develop a life of its own and pop up in Australia or France or America or Dublin.'](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/JYPGZ6UAS5CYVPQNC4K6C3GGRQ.jpg?auth=fbd0744139ff57c85eeead873c5edbab29fc7f5899e677d9e08f46e44beb58e1&width=800&height=916)
And go for it she did. Her career began with a job in Parlophone Records. She worked in the music industry and then pivoted into PR. She worked on Live Aid and Band Aid before going on to forge a career in broadcasting and journalism. When I praise her many achievements, she says, “I’m more opportunistic than anything else. I’m fairly fearless. I don’t really care what people think of me ... I stick my neck out because I really resent the way women get judged. And the more people judged me because I was okay-looking and a bit of a novelty and had opinions, the more I was incentivised to ignore them and prove them wrong.”
It certainly explains her tenacious menopause advocacy. But she also has plenty of non-menopause work to be getting on with. There’s a new advice column, Ask Mariella, in Hello magazine. She’s been made a trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and of the British Council. “That’s my non-paying work. And then I am writing a memoir of my childhood in Ireland from age 6 to 16, which I am very bad at knuckling down to, but I’m getting better.” To this end, she’s off in November to a week-long writing retreat in Marrakesh, at which one of the mentors is Irish author Colum McCann. “A memoir is a very unwieldy thing, I’m a third of the way through trying to put shape on it.”
‘I see young star-crossed lovers with their eyes glowing and I just think: make sure you marry your friend, because at the end of the day there will be periods when you don’t want to jump his bones, but you need to like him, and you need to feel they’ve got your back’
I’d be interested, when she’s finished that one, in reading a midlife Mariella Frostrup memoir. By her late 30s, she says, she’d managed to mostly get rid of her demons. “By 38 I was at peace with things that I had been scared of, like, if I ended up on my own, if I didn’t have children. I sort of thought, if that’s what happens, then I have a really good life, and I have really good friends, and I wasn’t looking so hard and in such a desperate way, and I’d also grown out of trying to replace my father.” She took a year out to do “scary or unusual things”, and one of those scary things was a mountain trek for charity, where she met her husband. “I was lucky he walked into the camp in the Himalayas.”
They clashed initially. He was far from her usual type. “I’ve always gone for like sulky, damaged Mediterranean-ish types, and he was half-Irish, on every level, not what I’ve been used to. And at first we just had a very sibling relationship. I mean, that week, when we were on this trek, we just basically bickered the whole time. And I’d love to say that’s changed. It hasn’t.”
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I met the couple at the Borris Festival of Writing & Ideas a few years ago and can confirm the bickering, which was Olympic standard and highly entertaining. She says of their relationship, “Hopefully, it does seem to be sustainable, because it’s been a couple of decades now. And I do think that’s down to one other thing as well, which is really important. We live in an age when everyone thinks that happiness is a constant, that the aspiration to happiness and achieving happiness is something everyone deserves … but ... that’s just not what life is like, there are ups and downs. And, in long-term relationships, it’s really important to just remember that there will be times when you could easily commit a crime in relation to your partner or spouse. They drive you so mad. And so we have times when we lead slightly parallel lives and times when we come back together again. I think, in a way, it’s just an echo of life itself.”
She’s in full agony aunt advice mode now and it’s a joy to listen to. “I see young star-crossed lovers with their eyes glowing and I just think: make sure you marry your friend, because at the end of the day there will be periods when you don’t want to jump his bones, but you need to like him, and you need to feel they’ve got your back. And that, I think, is like the absolute non-negotiable in a relationship. If someone doesn’t make you feel like they’ve got you and they’re a safe place, a safe harbour, then they’re not the right person.”
Unfortunately, because Frostrup is the kind of interviewee you could talk to all day – she is fascinating on her late-in-life severe ADHD diagnosis, and I’d like to ask her more about Clooney – she has to go soon, off to London on the train with her husband to celebrate a friend’s birthday. I ask her about living in the countryside, how it suits her, and she turns her laptop around to show me the stunning view of glorious greenery from the kitchen. “It’s a bit like Wicklow to be honest,” she says. Does she get back to Ireland much? “Any opportunity.” She’s been to menopause conferences here, she’s planning a trip to Cork next year and she visits friends often.
As she gets ready to depart, I ask why women should buy Menolicious. “I haven’t got a pithy answer,” she says, but she’s Mariella Frostrup and of course she has: “I just think we all want to feel the best we possibly can. And this is one tool in a toolbox that we need, stepping into midlife. And frankly, if you can cook something quick and easy that makes you feel good, well why wouldn’t you?”
Menolicious: Eat Your Way to a Better Menopause, by Mariella Frostrup and Belles Berry, is out now
