Kristyn Hodgdon
Everything you’re feeling, but didn’t know how to say.
Mr. Darcy Is the Original "If He Wanted To, He Would"
I'm not ashamed to admit it: Pride and Prejudice is my entire personality right now.
What I am a little ashamed to admit is that I hadn't read it until now, at 37, with a B.A. in English and almost ten years in book publishing on my resume. I spent a decade selling other people's stories, and somehow the most famous love story in the English language just sat there, waiting for me to have no professional reason to pick it up.
TBH, I've always been a little intimidated by the classics. Call it PTSD from reading for school, and then for work, for fifteen-plus years straight, but the "must-reads" everyone referenced always felt more like things I should want to read than things I actually did. So they piled up. And I let them.
Then I finally picked it up, crushed it in a week, and my takeaway? Everything they said. All of it. Completely true.
And Mr. Darcy — look, the man is the original "if he wanted to, he would." A hero who had to earn it. A woman who turned down the wrong proposal, held out for actual mutual respect, and didn't apologize for either. Written by someone who rejected a perfectly respectable marriage proposal herself, published under a pen name because that was the only way she could get the words out at all.
Austen knew exactly what women wanted and exactly what they deserved. She just put it on paper two hundred years before we had the language for it.
What Wellness Culture Gets Wrong About "Anti-Aging"
I’m in my late-30s, so it feels like everyone is laser-focused on anti-aging for their face right now. The serums, the SPF, the retinol, the treatments that involve tiny needles and a concerning amount of heat. And look, I get it: I have retinol and vitamin C serum on my bathroom shelf, and I'm not giving either of them up. But somewhere in the middle of all that focus on what's visible, we've completely glossed over the thing that actually holds us together.
Collagen isn't just a skincare ingredient. It makes up about 90% of your bone matrix and is the structural foundation of your joints, connective tissue, and tendons — less the thing that makes you look younger and more the thing that keeps you physically functional, the difference between a body that feels sturdy and one that's losing its scaffolding from the inside out.
What I didn't know until recently is that collagen production starts declining around age 25, at roughly 1-1.5% per year. By the time estrogen drops in perimenopause, the loss accelerates. Research shows women can lose up to 20% of their bone density in the five to seven years following menopause — not just from their skin. From their bones.
We talk about anti-aging like it's a cosmetic project, a matter of crow's feet and neck creams. But the version that actually affects your quality of life at 60, 70, and beyond is happening in tissues you can't see and won't notice until something gives way.
Your face will be fine. It's the infrastructure underneath it that's worth paying attention to.
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The Hour My Doctor Gave Me (That Most Women Don't Get)
Can you honestly say your healthcare provider has sat with you for over an hour during your annual physical?
I can. And it changed something.
I've been dealing with some health anxiety lately because of my ATM gene mutation — an increased lifetime risk of breast cancer, somewhere around 21 to 24%, roughly double the general population's. And despite working in women's health every single day, I still had questions nobody had fully answered: did IVF push that number higher? What kind of birth control doesn't add fuel to the fire? Is HRT actually safe for someone like me as I get closer to perimenopause, or is that a different calculation entirely?
My doctor is amazing, and she sat with me through all of it, pulling up research as we went instead of reciting something she'd memorized. There isn't a ton of data specifically on the ATM mutation, but there is enough to make an informed decision. For me, that's probably the Mirena IUD now, plus an estrogen patch as I get closer to menopause. For someone else with the exact same mutation, it might be completely different.
What actually stopped me was learning that the average doctor visit is 20.8 minutes. Twenty minutes to cover years of risk, competing options, and a decision that follows you for the rest of your life. I got three times that, and I still walked out with homework.
Those minutes aren't extra. Sometimes, they're the difference between a decision made with you and one made for you.
Ask Clara:
"Does IVF cause breast cancer?"
Wait, Is Alex Cooper Actually the Victim Here?
If you've been on TikTok for any amount of time recently, you've likely come across a video about the Alex Cooper vs. Alix Earle feud that nobody has fully explained.
It's still unresolved, but the more I see, the more I'm #TeamAlix. Anecdotal reports just suggest that she's an actually nice person — while this week, a Vanity Fair exposé came out about Alex Cooper's company being a toxic place to work, and her husband Matt Kaplan being, by all accounts, the absolute worst.
I literally signed up for a free trial of Vanity Fair yesterday to read the story (that's a whole other issue), and it gave me almost nothing.
What it did give me, though, was this: most of the decisions at Unwell are apparently made by Matt Kaplan. Not Alex. Her husband. The one allegedly screaming at employees, commenting on their bodies, asking about their sex lives. The one who, when someone called a move against Alix Earle a little mean-girl, said: "We're all mean girls at this company."
Unwell built its entire identity on women saying the thing they're not supposed to say. Create the space, say the quiet part out loud, make women feel less alone. That's the whole brand.
And yet the more I read, the more I kept thinking: what if Alex is less the villain here than we think? What if she's just the name on the door?
That's not an excuse. But it might be the more honest story, and honestly, it's a sadder one.
The Rage-y Middle-Aged Woman Trope Has Got to Go
Can we talk about the perimenopause storyline in Your Friends & Neighbors?
For those of you who don't watch the show: Jon Hamm plays a disgraced hedge fund manager who starts robbing his wealthy Westchester neighbors to maintain his lifestyle. Amanda Peet plays Mel, his ex-wife, a therapist who, by season two, has been fired, dumped, and completely iced out of her friend group, all more or less at once. It's a lot. The show is great.
Was Mel the most likable character in season one? Not necessarily. But this feels like they couldn't figure out what else to do with her in season two, so they said: let's make her a rage-y middle-aged woman with hot flashes.
And here's the thing — it's not that far from the truth of it. Waking up in drenched sheets. The mood that arrives before you even realize it has. Maybe a little vaginal atrophy nobody talks about but apparently Apple TV will. The writers clearly did their research. But it still feels a little forced, like perimenopause is doing the narrative heavy lifting instead of Mel actually getting a storyline.
There's a difference between a show that portrays perimenopause accurately and one that uses it to explain why a woman is difficult. The symptoms can be right and the framing still be off. And I think that's what's nagging at me — because when it's done well, you feel seen. When it's not, you just feel like a punchline with night sweats.
Women going through perimenopause deserve better writing. Even, especially, when the writing is better than usual.
Ask Clara:
"Why does perimenopause make me so angry?"
The Protein We Missed While Counting Points
I was on Weight Watchers in high school. Not because my mom suggested it or a doctor recommended it — because that was just the air we were breathing in the early 2000s. Less was more. Smaller was better. Points were currency, and I spent mine accordingly. The goal, always, was to take up less space. (And if you've been on the internet lately, you know we're not exactly far from that in 2026.)
It took me an embarrassingly long time to unlearn that. And when the conversation finally shifted — when "eat more protein" started replacing "eat less everything" — something in me genuinely relaxed. We were talking about building something instead of subtracting it. Muscle, strength, a body that could actually do things. I was on board.
But here's what didn't make it into the protein conversation, at least not loudly enough: not all proteins do the same job. Collagen — the most abundant protein in your body, the one that holds your bones, joints, skin, and connective tissue together — isn't something you get from a whey shake or a chicken breast. It's a completely different protein, and most of us aren't getting nearly enough of it from food alone.
Your body starts producing less of its own collagen around age 25, losing roughly 1-1.5% per year. By your late 30s, you feel it: in your joints, in recovery time, in the general sense that your body needs a little more support than it used to.
I spent years optimizing for smaller. Turns out what I actually needed was to optimize for stronger.
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When Everything Is Fine (And That's the Problem)
Does anyone else get anxiety when things are good?
Give me a trip to labor and delivery almost three months early and I'll be calm as a cucumber — true story — but give me the first summer in three years where I'm not postpartum, pregnant, or actively trying to get pregnant, and I'll be a ball of nerves.
That's kind of where I'm at right now.
I'm happier than I've been in years. My family finally feels complete. It's summer and I live in a beach town. My kids are at ages that are genuinely fun — not "fun because I love them unconditionally" fun, but actually, legitimately fun. And yet, I've been through enough to know that the other shoe can drop at any time.
There's actually a name for this: anticipatory anxiety, the kind that flares not in crisis but in the calm between them. After years of fertility treatments, high-stakes waiting, and pregnancies where you held your breath through every scan, your nervous system starts treating peace like a red flag. The threat didn't change; you just stopped having a reason to white-knuckle it.
Social media doesn't help — it has a way of showing up right when you've let your guard down and reminding you of everything that could go sideways.
But despite all of it, I'm trying to let summer actually be summer, to live in the moment instead of bracing for whatever comes next.
It turns out the hardest thing about finally being okay is trusting yourself to stay there.
The Hair Talk That Wasn't About Hair
Earlier today, my hairdresser and I were deep in conversation about hair — specifically, how neither of us was ever really taught how to take care of ours. No one showed us the right way to wash it, what our texture actually needed, or why everything we tried in our teens and twenties seemed to make it worse (hi, Suave extra control styling gel). We figured it out eventually, in our 30s, mostly through trial and error and the occasional humbling TikTok.
I told her I've been trying to do it differently with my daughter — teaching her the things I had to learn the hard way, whether that's hair, or her body, or how to actually listen to what it's telling her.
Which is also, not coincidentally, my entire job.
Researchers contributing to Women and Health, a new book co-edited by Boston University School of Public Health professor Yvette Cozier, surfaced a stat this week that I haven't been able to shake: women live an average of five years longer than men in the United States, but spend 25% more of their lives in poor health. Longer, but not better. More years, more suffering.
I think about that a lot — while managing an autoimmune disease I only half understand, scrolling through wellness advice that somehow makes me feel worse, and watching everyone around me chase a version of health that looks more like a second job than an actual life. We were never taught how any of this works. We inherited confusion and were handed a supplement routine in its place.
My daughter is seven. She has time. And I have just enough hard-won information to make sure she spends a little less of her longer life figuring it out alone.
The Best Thing My Parents Gave Me (Wasn't a Thing)
There's a particular feeling at the bottom of the ninth — two outs, bases loaded, the whole stadium holding its breath — where your body stops belonging to you and becomes part of something bigger. I grew up on that feeling. Queens girl, Italian family, the kind of house where sports was just part of how we showed up for each other.
I was in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium for the three-peat: '98, '99, 2000. My mom, my dad, my brother, all of us crammed into those seats like it was the most natural place in the world to be. You didn't need to explain it. It was just part of us, like Sunday sauce and big goodbyes.
So when the Knicks won their first championship in 53 years last week and New York lost its mind in the streets, I felt it even from Long Island. A grief specialist named Barri Leiner Grant wrote about it afterward, calling it "collective effervescence" — the electricity that runs through a crowd when everyone is hoping for the same thing at the same time. Strangers becoming a we.
I was a softball player, a cheerleader, and a musical theater kid in high school, and what I remember most isn't the wins. It's the feeling of being on a team, of something mattering to a whole group of people at once. My son plays baseball now. My daughter swims. And I am, it turns out, exactly the kind of parent who loses her mind from the sidelines (respectfully, of course).
I didn't fully understand then what my parents were giving me in those bleachers. I just thought we were watching baseball.
Nobody Told Me Collagen Starts Declining in Your 20s
Nobody handed me a pamphlet at 25 that said: heads up, your collagen production just peaked, and it's declining from here. There was no mention of it at any of my annual physicals, no footnote in the prenatal vitamin instructions, no asterisk next to the daily SPF recommendation.
We talk to young women about sun damage and calcium and folic acid — all important! — and somehow skip entirely over the protein that makes up most of their bones, holds their joints together, and starts quietly disappearing right around the time they're just figuring out their lives.
Collagen is the most abundant protein in your body. It's the structural foundation of your skin, yes, but also your bones, tendons, cartilage, and connective tissue. Production peaks in your early-to-mid twenties and then drops by roughly 1-1.5% per year after that, gradually at first, then faster when estrogen falls in perimenopause. By 50, you've lost roughly a quarter of your peak levels.
The reason most of us don't get enough through food is straightforward: collagen lives in the bones, skin, and connective tissue of animals, and most of us don't eat that way anymore. Our grandmothers made bone broth because that's how you used the whole animal. We eat chicken breasts and protein bars, which are great, and also not the same thing.
I'm not saying this to add another wellness “thing” to your list. I'm saying it because I genuinely wish someone had told me sooner — ideally before I spent a decade not thinking about it at all.
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