Nearly 35,000 women each week attend the show in New York, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles and other cities across the country and abroad. “Menopause the Musical” by playwright Jeannie Linders started in a 76-seat perfume-shop-turned-theater in Orlando in 2001. Manufacturers and designers, including pajama maven Karen Neuberger, are marketing new lines of sleepwear, leisurewear and underwear made of high-tech fibers designed to help minimize the effects of hot flashes. These days, menopause has entered the public consciousness. But women currently experiencing menopause, who came of age in the 1960s with books such as “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” have a more open attitude and are less willing to suffer in silence. In the past, says Thayer, women were reluctant to seek help for such symptoms. The North American Menopause Society, for example, estimates that 75 percent of menopausal women experience hot flashes or night sweats and lack of sleep. For many women, the process can be challenging. What they’re experiencing - the end of menstruation and childbearing years - generally occurs between the ages of 40 and 55, when estrogen production slows. “Middle-aged women love that someone is writing about what they’re really experiencing.” “Friends tell friends about the books,” says Thayer. Thayer says the reader response has been astonishing. “My editor told me the only books that would sell were about women in their thirties having lots of sex.” “To say they weren’t interested is an understatement,” says Thayer. Thayer, a best-selling author with 13 earlier novels, went to her editor and proposed the concept. Gradually, she developed the idea of a series called “The Hot Flash Club,” with a story line that followed four women of a certain age, who help each other cope with divorce, adult children, aging parents and other problems of growing older. Most of our support for each other came through our ability to laugh together.” “We’d go for long walks and talk about the physical changes we were seeing in our bodies. “I was having hot flashes, as were my friends,” says Thayer, 62. Her “Hot Flash Club” novels, which pull no punches on the good, the bad and the ugly of middle age - spreading hips, widening waistlines, cellulite, killer personal heat waves and all - were inspired by her own experiences and those of her closest confidants. As far as the 62-year-old Nantucket writer is concerned, menopause isn’t the “silent passage” anymore - and she’s written a series of books to prove it. Call Nancy Thayer “the hot flash queen.” She doesn’t mind a bit.

The hot flash club strikes again