The night before her big race, Alex is struck by a familiar feeling within. “I was beginning to have a very unwelcome suspicion. It was another ten minutes before I could bring myself to get out of bed and investigate.” Her period has arrived, a whole week early. “Oh no, no! Damn, damn, damn,” she yells out from the bathroom, before deciding to internalise her rage. “It was a complication I didn’t need,” she thought to herself. “But not an excuse either. I decided not to tell anyone.”
Periods come and go in Alex, the iconic 1987 young adult novel, just as they do in real life. Following the 15 year-old swimmer as she strives to qualify for the Olympics in 1959, the book is packed with mentions of menstruation from the second chapter. “Strange things happened to my body that third form year,” Alex recalls. “Fortunately, my periods soon settled into a regular routine, hardly noted from month to month.” She ponders the impact of her period on her races, and the swimmers who take pills to stop it, all the way to the very last page, where she packs her gym bag full of “towels, caps, glucose and tampons”.
For many young New Zealanders, it was their first introduction to a protagonist with a period in local popular culture, but author Tessa Duder never considered it a particularly groundbreaking inclusion. “I didn’t put it in there deliberately, it was just part of her story growing up as a 15-year-old in a competitive sport,” she shttps://authors.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Tessa-Duder_Janet-Frame.png
ays. Growing up in the 1950s herself, Duder saw Alex as a chance to challenge the stuffy social attitudes of the time. “I don’t remember any chat in the dressing rooms, nothing at school, I just don’t remember it ever being a subject of discussion.”
