I wrote a book!

I wrote a book!
It’s out now from Penguin and available wherever books are sold.

The idea started the way so many good things do, as a zine. Inspired by generations of women and gender-expansive people gathering to understand their bodies when the system left them hanging, we imagined we would design and print something our clients could actually use. (Thank you Our Bodies, Ourselves, and the bible, Toni Weschler’s Taking Charge of Your Fertility).

I co-wrote this book with Morgan Miller, an absolutely brilliant midwife, friend, and advocate, after years in therapy rooms and birth centers where we saw the same thing over and over: people didn’t have access to basic, trustworthy, empowering information about their hormones.

We asked each other, How can we make informed decisions about our health, sexuality, or mental well-being if we’ve never been taught how to listen to our bodies?

We confided our personal experiences trying to find our own answers and bonded over our rage when we saw our clients going through the same thing.

Not because they weren’t looking, because it didn’t exist! At least not in the form we wanted:
*A method that was about way more than fertility or bleeding
*A method that taught how to listen to what your hormones are telling you, not “hack” them
*A method to keep your data safe, not hand it over to the broligarchy

We wanted something simple, analog, beautiful, and customizable.

A powerful tool
A tool to help people actually see their cycles, moods, mental health symptoms, pleasure, and pain in one place. Something to help clients understand why they feel the way they feel and what they might want to do about it. An education that highlighted the total body system impact regular hormonal shifts can have - on our mental health, our sexuality, our physical selves, our fertility, and our cognition.

Here’s the wild part:
Popular period-tracking apps, used by over 50 million people worldwide, predict ovulation with about 20% accuracy.
Twenty percent!!!

Add in questionable privacy policies, data breaches, predatory promises, and lawsuits, and we realized that the digital solutions weren’t really the solutions we were looking for.

So we made our own.
A pen-and-paper tracking system that honors complexity, privacy, and fosters personal agency.

This book is about hormones, yes, but also about choice, mental health, desire, trauma, sexuality, and self-trust.
We envision a new sex education, one that starts with curiosity, not shame.

We believe everyone deserves to understand how their body works. And we believe that pleasure should be a part of that.

——

And if you’re curious about events, talks, or cycle-based conversations, follow us over on Instagram @thecyclebook or on our website itslauraandmorgan.com

We also had the joy of collaborating with two incredible artists and friends on this book, Maxine McCrann and Miles Yoshida, whose work brings the inside and outside of these pages to life. Check them out to learn more about the art that makes this book so special.

In the meantime:
Let’s go analog!

Trust yourself, stay critical, and don’t settle.

Thinking of all of you!