From Behind the Scenes to the Page and the Stage: Laura Bergman on Becoming a Writer in Midlife

Laura Bergman spent almost forty years making it possible for other people’s art to happen. She raised money for theaters, ran one, sat on boards, and wrote the grants that turn an artist’s vision into something a funder can say yes to. Then, in midlife, she became a writer herself.

Laura and I met at a house fundraiser for the Menopause Monologues, where she stood up and performed a piece she wrote called “Menopause Showdown.” We have been walking and talking together ever since, and I wanted you to hear her.

If you have spent decades being the person who makes things possible for everyone else, this conversation is for you.

A career spent behind the curtain

Laura was born in Spain, grew up moving around Europe, and landed in Pleasanton, California, from Amsterdam in seventh grade. “Talk about a culture shock there,” she said. She worked on political campaigns, earned a master’s in public policy and management at Carnegie Mellon, and spent four years in Prague with her husband before settling in San Francisco and finding her way into the arts.

She became executive director of Z Space, a theater in the Mission. When her children were small she stepped into the development director role, and when she started to call it “just development,” I stopped her. She agreed: “It was the best part of the job that I liked the most, so I didn’t find it to be a lesser role at all.”

You probably know that pattern. Many of us got very good at being the one who holds everything up, and very few of us were ever asked what we wanted to make.

How a board seat turned into a stage

Laura’s friend Lulu Braunstein recruited her to the Town Hall Theatre board in Lafayette with a simple line: “I’m not gonna join the board unless you do.” Lulu, Carrie Vanhouten and Lisa Anne Morrison went on to create the Menopause Monologues, and you can hear my conversation with the three of them from earlier this year.

They started with a workshop. Any woman who wanted to could come for an afternoon and write, draw, dance or say what she had never said out loud about menopause. The first show sold out, and the talkbacks with doctors afterward ran almost as long as the show. “It’s not just the monologues,” Laura said. “It’s an actual movement.”

After seeing that first show, Laura went home and wrote her own piece. She submitted it and heard nothing for a month. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, they must have hated it.’” Then her phone rang, and all three creators were on the line, laughing their heads off.

The story behind “Menopause Showdown”

The piece braids together two true stories. One is a stranger who lost her temper over the way Laura parked while she was dropping her daughter at college, and Laura’s realization that the woman was probably going through something she knew well. The other is Laura’s own experience with hormone pellets.

She describes being angry with everyone within a week, while her libido woke up at the same time. “I was angry with my husband, but I also was very attracted to him.” The euphoria that followed lasted about two days. “It wasn’t worth the anger and the other stuff for two days of pure bliss,” she said, so she stopped, and later learned the pellets she had used were not FDA-approved.

That is Laura’s experience, told with humor, and it is not a recommendation for or against any treatment. If hormone therapy is on your mind, start with what I have written about hormone therapy after menopause, and then take your questions to your own clinician.

“I’m not meant to perform”

Laura has loved theater her whole life and had performed exactly once, in high school, after which her mother told her she was not meant to perform. Decades later, she stood up in front of a room full of women with her own words. “It felt more like stand-up comedy, to tell you the truth.”

I asked her what she had to let go of to become the one making the art. She did not hesitate. “Self-consciousness. Absolutely.” And then: “If I blow it on stage, I mean, first of all, it’d be funny, and second of all, who cares?”

She also named the grace in that room. She knew that if she stumbled, the women watching would be fine with it. That is worth noticing, because you may be waiting to feel ready when what you actually need is the right room.

From a short story to a book

Laura began writing when her son Miles was three months old. He was adopted, and she wanted a record of what it took to bring him home. “I just wanted him to know how much he was really wanted by a lot of people.” During COVID a friend suggested a writing club, and over the next year that short story became a book.

What gave her the nerve to try publishing it was “Menopause Showdown.” The piece was accepted into a San Francisco writers’ conference anthology as a nonfiction finalist. Even then, she told herself, “Well, I’m not really a writer.”

I pushed back on calling that imposter syndrome, and I will say the same to you. When you are genuinely new at something, the doubt you feel is a beginner’s doubt, and self-doubt is not imposter syndrome. At the conference, Laura heard the publisher of Sibylline Press say they publish women over 50. “I was like, ‘Hey, that’s me.’” Waiting for Miles comes out April 23.

Just write for the fun of it

So what would Laura say to the woman who has been thinking “someday I’ll write” for twenty years? “I think just write for the fun of it. Who cares if anyone ever sees it?”

She told me about the postcards she used to send from every trip. After her father died, she found them in his study, a stack several inches thick, a record of her whole young life in her own handwriting. “If it makes you happy, just write.”

She also paints in oils, and she described how a story, like a painting, can take off in a direction you never planned. “The process is important, not just the words that you write.” That is the same thing I found when I wrote about what watercolor, yoga, and aging have in common. At this age you get to make something without knowing how it will turn out.

Here is the part that is about you. What have you been saving for someday? Try it this week, for no audience at all.

What sexy means to Laura right now

Laura’s first answer came from her brother, who once told her that confident women are sexy. Then she took it further. For her, sexy at this age means being confident enough to be a little vulnerable, to “not be perfect all the time and let people see some of your flaws.”

She gives herself the same grace: “Yes, I might screw it up, but that’s okay. It doesn’t change who I am. It doesn’t change what I’ve done. It doesn’t change the people I’ve helped.”

Listen to the Full Episode

Episode 47: From Behind the Scenes to the Page and the Stage: Laura Bergman on Becoming a Writer in Midlife

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Connect with Laura Bergman

Substack: Laura Bergman Writes
Instagram @laurabergmansays

Waiting for Miles comes out April 23 from Sibylline Press. Follow Laura’s Substack for launch news.

Laura performs “Menopause Showdown” at Litquake with the Menopause Monologues on Sunday, October 18 at 3:00 p.m., in “Menopause Extravaganza: The Science and Culture of a Subject No One Used to Want to Talk About,” at Gray Area in San Francisco’s Mission District. Find it on the Litquake 2026 schedule

About Dvora Citron

Dvora Citron, RN MS, NBC-HWC, is a Registered Nurse, National Board Certified Health & Wellness Coach, and the founder of slant2plants®. She hosts Sexy in Your 60s to bring women the real ingredients of vibrant aging through science, story, strategies, and soul.

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Where Are You Still Making Yourself Smaller?

That is the question underneath this whole season. If you want to answer it live, with me, join The 5-Minute Reality Check for Women 50+ on Thursday, November 19. It is one hour, it is free, and you will leave knowing where you already take up space and where you are ready to take more.

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Nothing in this episode is medical advice. It is education and lived experience. Anything you are weighing for your own health is a decision to make with your own healthcare provider, who knows your history and your whole picture.