For years, Emma Hardy thought she was simply bad at coping. Every month, she would find herself consumed by rage, despair, anxiety and emotional overwhelm. Then it would pass. Life would return to normal. Until the cycle began again.
Now, the Melbourne-based writer is sharing that experience in her powerful new memoir, Periodic Bitch: A Memoir of Menstruation, Madness and Monsters – and opening up about the realities of living with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) on the latest episode of You’re Gonna Want To Hear This with Marie Claire editor Georgie McCourt.
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The conversation is one that will resonate with countless women. PMDD, a severe hormone-related mood disorder that affects an estimated one in 20 women, remains widely misunderstood despite its profound impact on mental health, relationships and daily life. Symptoms can include severe depression, anxiety, irritability, emotional dysregulation and suicidal ideation in the days and weeks leading up to menstruation.
For Hardy, finally receiving a diagnosis was not the relief many might expect.
“I thought it was catastrophic,” she tells McCourt on the podcast. “At the time, it just meant that I was going to keep coming back to that feeling.”
Throughout the episode, Hardy and McCourt speak candidly about their own experiences with PMDD, including the emotional outbursts, relationship conflict and overwhelming feelings that can accompany the condition.
The conversation extends well beyond diagnosis and treatment. In Periodic Bitch, Hardy explores the cultural history of female illness, drawing connections between PMDD, hysteria, horror stories and society’s longstanding discomfort with female anger. The book examines why women who express rage are so often portrayed as unstable, irrational or monstrous – and why those stereotypes persist.
“I was looking for examples of female rage,” Hardy explains. “And all of those examples were monsters.”
That exploration led her down unexpected paths, from historical court cases involving women whose crimes were linked to premenstrual disorders to scientific research conducted on laboratory rats. What emerged is part memoir, part cultural critique and part investigation into the stories women have been told about their bodies for centuries.
One of the central questions of both the book and the podcast is deceptively simple: when is a mood just a mood, and when does it become an illness?
For Hardy, there is no easy answer.
“We are really good at pathologising women’s real pain,” she says. “And we’re also really quick to dismiss women’s complaints when we do have something wrong with us.”
The result is a conversation that feels both deeply personal and urgently political.
At a time when discussions about women’s health are finally gaining greater visibility, Hardy’s work shines a light on a condition that remains significantly under-researched and under-diagnosed, while challenging the assumptions that continue to shape how women’s emotions are understood.
Most importantly, it offers something many women living with PMDD have struggled to find: recognition.
As Hardy says in the episode’s closing moments, perhaps the goal isn’t to spend so much time worrying about whether we’re “too emotional”, but instead to stop fearing those emotions altogether.
Periodic Bitch: A Memoir of Menstruation, Madness and Monsters by Emma Hardy is out now.
Listen to Emma Hardy on the latest episode of You’re Gonna Want To Hear This wherever you get your podcasts.
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