Kristyn Hodgdon
Everything you’re feeling, but didn’t know how to say.
I Haven't Read The Love Hypothesis Yet (But I Know How It Ends)
I haven't read The Love Hypothesis yet (I know, I know), but now that the movie with Lili Reinhart is streaming on Prime Video, it's at the top of my list. I love a good romance novel, and I'll read pretty much anything Emily Henry, Carley Fortune, or Jasmine Guillory puts out.
So when I went looking for whether romance novels are actually good for you, I was a little annoyed to find there isn't much research on romance on its own — which honestly doesn't surprise me for a genre mostly written and read by women. There is plenty on reading in general, though. In one randomized trial of nearly 1,000 people, 42% of those who read a book in bed for a week said their sleep improved, compared to 28% of those who didn't.
I believe it, but that's not really why I read them. I already sleep like a rock (my Oura ring can vouch for me), and a good romance has kept me up past midnight more than once because two people still hadn't admitted how they felt, which I'm sure is not exactly the wind-down the researchers had in mind.
Like most things, I think it goes back to infertility. For almost eight years, my life ran on two-week waits, trying not to read into every cramp with no idea how any of it would end. With romance, you know from the very first page that they end up together, and the only question is how long it takes them to figure it out.
It's the only kind of waiting I've ever enjoyed.
The Urgent Care Trip Your UTI Doesn't Need
If you've ever felt the very specific discomfort of having to pee thirty seconds after you just went, welcome to Girlhood. The burning, the urgency, the sense that something is off before you've even confirmed it — you don't need a lab to tell you what your body already knows.
And you're probably not wrong to want to skip the whole detour. For most women with an uncomplicated UTI, a urine culture isn't actually required before doctors start treatment. Current guidelines list fosfomycin, nitrofurantoin, and trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole, all standard antibiotics, as first-line options based on symptoms alone. And yet, the default is still: drag yourself somewhere, sit in a waiting room, describe the same three symptoms to a stranger, and walk out with antibiotics you basically diagnosed yourself.
What changes the experience isn't more testing. It's having someone who can just listen, hear "it burns and I've been here before," and take that as sufficient information, not the start of a workup. Apios Health treats straightforward UTIs from home over text. No copay for a visit you didn't need, no explaining yourself twice. And if something's actually more complicated, like recurrent infections, pelvic floor stuff, or an STI you'd swear was a UTI, they loop in a specialist.
So much of women's healthcare still runs on the assumption that we need to prove we're really in pain before anyone does anything about it. A UTI isn't a mystery; it just requires someone willing to believe you the first time.
Pregnant "In No Time" (Narrator: She Was Not)
There's a big part of the fertility journey that doesn't get enough credit, and spoiler alert: it's everything that happens before IVF.
When I first got diagnosed with PCOS (now PMOS, although I still can't get used to saying it), my fertility specialist at the time told me I'd "just need some Clomid or Letrozole" — aka ovulation induction meds — to kickstart my cycle, and I'd be pregnant "in no time." Fast forward one year later, and I was starting IVF, wondering why the hell it took her so long to suggest the one thing that actually ended up working.
IVF isn't a guarantee, and I know that better than most now. But the steps that usually come before it — ovulation induction, timed intercourse, IUI — rarely get talked about with any real detail. My body, for one, over-responded to Clomid (think: multiple mature follicles, high risk of triplets and beyond), and under-responded to Letrozole. My IUI cycles were often grueling, with dozens of monitoring appointments before even getting to the trigger shot and IUI, all for odds that hover somewhere between 10 and 20% per medicated cycle.
After months and months of hope and disappointment, IVF is what ended up working for us, but that's just my story, and I know it doesn't look the same for everyone.
All of this is to say, we want to keep highlighting those experiences. If you have a Letrozole success story, or an IUI cycle you're proud of, I'd love to hear from you: kristyn@rescripted.com.
Somewhere, right now, someone's IUI is about to be the one that finally works, and I want her to have hope while she's still in it.
Being a Sports Mom Is Not for the Weak
I was an athlete my whole life — softball, basketball, cheerleading, more softball, with a theater-kid detour in between. Most of my best friends came out of team sports, the kind of friendships you only get from being sweaty and fourteen together. So you'd think I'd be built for this next phase. Instead, I'm completely overwhelmed by it.
Part of it is having twins. Up until now, my boy/girl duo has either played on the same team or stuck to rec and intramural: low stakes, same schedule, done. Third grade, apparently, is where that ends. They're each on separate travel soccer teams now, with two practices a week per kid and a game on Saturdays, which sounds manageable until you're actually in it.
This past Saturday we had a game at 11, another at 2:45, and our neighborhood block party at 4. I scrubbed my bathroom in the ninety-minute gap between fields, half-watching my toddler, half-wondering why my kids had to turn out athletic when I already have a full-time job and an ADHD brain that was not built for this many calendar invites.
And still: I watched my son score his first goal. I watched my daughter find her footing on the turf, literally, and get that little flash of I can do this on her face. I love the teams they landed on, and with the help of our village, I think we're actually going to be okay.
There's a version of this where I pull back, where two sports across two kids is too much. But I keep coming back to the same gut check I use for everything else as a mom: not what looks balanced on paper, just whether they're lit up when I pick them up. So far, they are.
The Case for Starting a Book Club
My friends like to make fun of me because many of my relationships over the last decade or so have started with book clubs. Here's how it goes: I form a book club, we meet a couple of times, people connect, books are read (and not read), wine is had, and friendships grow. Some stick, some don't. But that's not the point. The point is connection... and interesting conversation.
I thought about this while reading The Atlantic's recent cover story on the decline of reading in America. Fewer than half of adults reported reading a book in 2022, and just 20 percent of adults account for more than 80 percent of all books read in a year (read that again). The piece calls this shift postliterate: not illiterate, just unable to sit with something long enough to think it through.
What hit home for me wasn't the average attention span on a screen shrinking to 47 seconds, although that did make me want to throw my phone in the ocean. It was that reading forces a slowness nothing else does. You can't scroll through a novel. You sit in someone else's head for a few hundred pages, and that is its own act of defiance.
The real magic happens in discussing it, though. A book club isn't really about the book. It's an excuse to sit across from other women and talk — about the plot twist, sure, but also whatever's actually going on that week, like the diagnosis someone's still processing, or the kid they're worried about but haven't brought up yet.
So start the club. Half of them won't read the book, but most of them will show up for each other.
Sara Bareilles Wrote the Infertility Song I Needed at 28
My co-founder Abby sent me a clip of Sara Bareilles talking about her new song, and it instantly brought tears to my eyes.
I've always said that sitting in the waiting room of a fertility clinic at 28 years young, where everyone was going through a similar experience and yet no one was making eye contact, is what inspired me to start Rescripted.
There's no lonelier feeling than being in a room full of people dealing with the same heartbreaking experience but too ashamed to speak about it, or even look at one another.
That's exactly what Sara captures in "Ladies in a Line," off her new album Good Grief. She's been trying to have a baby for three years, and in a recent interview she said something that deeply resonated: she'd found plenty of women talking about how hard it was once they finally had a healthy baby in their arms, but almost nobody talking from inside the messy middle.
This song sits in that middle. The needles, the waiting, the grief of starting later than planned, a running list of names for a baby who hasn't arrived. She describes the process like swimming in water someone else is directing, with no idea when you'll be allowed to stop. I did several rounds of IVF, so none of that is hard to imagine.
What gets me is that she wrote this before knowing how her own story ends, and it gives me chills thinking how many women will feel less alone because of it.
A 2024 survey found that 39% of women trying to conceive underestimated how lonely it would feel, which makes sense, considering I still think about my own waiting room experience. It's nice to finally have the song none of us could sing out loud back then.
Gabrielle Union Talks Hot Flashes, and I Am Taking Notes
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Gabrielle Union-Wade, which, as someone who was a high school cheerleader in the early 2000s, was a major fangirl moment for me. But perhaps even moreso than her role in Bring It On, is my admiration for her unflinching openness about fertility, surrogacy, motherhood, and now, menopause.
She told me about shooting a sex scene with a costar twenty-plus years younger than her when a hot flash hit so hard she was instantly drenched. The crew thought she looked scared, but she wasn't; she'd done thousands of these scenes. She just felt herself shrinking, and Gabrielle Union does not shrink.
She'd learned she was perimenopausal in her late thirties, from a routine blood panel during a fertility workup, years before a single hot flash showed up. Then in her mid-forties, they arrived, and not the fleeting kind the name implies.
Nurse Barb, a nurse practitioner and certified menopause specialist on the call, said residents get one or two total hours of menopause education in training. I can't even get through a lasagna recipe in an hour.
About 1.3 million women enter menopause every year in the U.S., and hot flashes can stick around for seven years, some well over a decade. Researchers call those women "super flashers," which sounds like a superhero and decidedly is not.
After calling her doctor and saying, essentially, this cannot be life, Gabrielle found something that worked. But when I asked what she'd gained, she skipped past the treatment and went straight to the community: other women comparing notes, realizing they weren't the only ones white-knuckling it through a meeting, or in her case, a scene.
She didn't need a fix so much as she needed company, and I'd say the same goes for most of us.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube here.
PSA: Nobody Is Joking (Let's Change That)
Anyone who knows me well knows I rarely take anything seriously... until I do.
Infertility? Serious as a heart attack. Breast cancer? I lost my best friend to the disease at 31, so aside from some dark humor with mutual friends (IYKYK), I'll have you know I'm on my way to my annual mammogram as I type this.
But then I came across a clip of Adam Devine on his podcast, This Is Important, saying, "No one is joking" — and I felt it deep in my soul. Not because it was profound, because it was the opposite of profound.
I've said before that I hate small talk. But this clip got me rethinking what I actually hate, which isn't small talk exactly; it's talk with no personality behind it. What I'm after isn't just depth — it's a shared sense of humor. Someone who finds the same things funny I do, which, if I'm honest, is not much. It's the mundane stuff, the things people do that are hilarious and don't even know it.
Seinfeld is one of my all-time favorite shows, and I compare myself to Jerry more than is probably healthy, because WHAT DO YOU MEAN the only thing you can think to say to me is that it's "chilly for mid-September"? A whole other person is standing in front of you.
It's become even more obvious since becoming a mom. I'm surrounded by parents all the time, not always of my own choosing, and half of what passes for conversation at pickup is a script: weather, traffic, whose kid has the stomach bug going around. I don't dislike any of these people. I just want, every once in a while, for one of them to say something weird enough that I still remember it by dinner (and laugh).
I want my kids to have a sense of humor, too — the real kind, not the class-clown kind. The kind where you notice things. Where you clock the absurd detail nobody else is going to mention out loud, and you mention it, and somebody across the room gets it.
I want my kids to know: you can sob at a funeral and still make the joke only that person would've laughed at. Neither one cancels the other out.
I'm not saying there's no time or place to be serious. I clearly know there is. But maybe if we didn't take ourselves quite so seriously all the time, life would just be a little more fun. No?
Dolly Parton, Gloria Steinem, and Two Kinds of Feminism
Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem died eight days apart this month, and admittedly, I didn't know much about either of them beyond the headlines — Dolly's rhinestones, "I Will Always Love You," and the free books she mailed to kids for decades; Gloria's aviators, Ms. Magazine, and a life spent advocating for women's rights. So I did a deep dive, and a PBS NewsHour piece on their deaths put it so eloquently it bears repeating: "One shaped and delivered the language of feminism. The other rejected the label but showed how feminism can be done."
Steinem said the word out loud her whole life, founded Ms. Magazine, and told the National Press Club in 2013, "If we each have a torch, there's a lot more light." Dolly never actually said it, and when someone asked her flat out whether she considered herself a feminist, she said, "No, I do not," then mentioned she'd "never met a man whose ass I couldn't kick if he didn't treat me with the right respect" — which honestly tells you everything the label was supposed to mean in the first place.
Steinem called her one anyway, putting Dolly on the cover of Ms. in 1987 and writing, "If feminism means each of us finding your unique power, and helping other women do the same, Dolly Parton certainly has done both," though Dolly never really returned the favor in public (and never needed to).
I think about that now, as someone who's spent years trying to make women's health sound more like a person than a mission statement. The truth is, you don't have to use the words to be doing the work. You just have to actually be doing it.
Heavy on the Trauma, Hold the Small Talk
Call it PMS, or call it my complete inability to engage in small talk, but somehow I often feel lonely amongst a large group of friends.
You would never know it. I'm (mostly) an extrovert, and I usually appear completely calm, cool, and collected (even, dare I say, funny) in bigger groups.
But I hate small talk, and I find myself in my comfort zone with individual friendships. Put me in a backyard birthday party with twelve women I genuinely like, and I'll laugh at the right moments, ask about the bathroom renovation, nod along about sports schedules, and somewhere around minute forty, go somewhere else in my head — not because I don't care, but because I'm wondering who here would actually tell me the real version of how they're doing if I could just get them alone by the drink table for four minutes.
So I looked it up. Turns out it's not just me being weird, and there's real data behind it. A replicated version of the famous "eavesdropping on happiness" study found that people who have more substantive, one-on-one conversations report greater life satisfaction. Small talk isn't the villain; it just doesn't move the needle. It's not toxic, just filler. I don't need to defend it. I need less of it, and more of the real kind in its place.
And loneliness, researchers keep finding, was never really about how many people are in the room — it's about whether any of them actually see you in it. I can be surrounded by women who would drop everything for me and still leave a party feeling like I said nothing authentic all night.
Give me someone’s trauma, her rising sign, the whole absurdly specific version of her life, and I'll take that over small talk every time.