This will be the last time I consider a “women’s” anthology. This review – of a book of essays edited by women and written by women about things women apparently don’t talk about – will celebrate and eulogize. It’s a party because I’ve changed my life; it’s sad because parts of me have passed on.

Carol Shields and her friend, Marjorie Anderson, conceived this book over a two-hour, wit-and-wisdom lunch. They noted how even “in an age of intense and open communication,” things still go unsaid between women, especially those in middle age. Shields calls them “skipped discourses” and the book promises to spill guts and shed light. Concept still warm, the editors asked some “women friends” to contribute essays about events and emotions previously unspeakable, or at least unspoken.

Their contributors are politicians, academics, lawyers, housewives. Many are writers: journalists, poets, novelists, historians. The editors were after a multi-voiced expression of womanhood’s secrets and decided against too much caustic craft and precision. Many pieces are chatty and intimate only in the sense of “familiar”; they lack the tooling of good writing and rely on single, often unexplored anecdotes.

Here’s my first regret. The subjects in Dropped Threads – society’s co-opting of women’s bodies; our extorted professional opportunities; the legacy of our repressed mothers – for a long and revolutionary period excited me. Now I am bored by them. Women don’t bore me, any more than men who go on about the beauty of a well-dealt body-check or the difference between seasoned and dry firewood. Their energy is great, their voices are rich. But the patience to endure mantra-topics has left me. Or at least to endure those expressed in maudlin, mundane, or flat language.

There are exciting and truly intimate entries in this book. Lorna Crozier on her drunken father; Miriam Toews on her sad and suicidal father; Marni Jackson on her hilarious teenage son – these women take ideas, even secret ones, and infuse them with poetry, scoured and buffed sentences, and, in the case of Jackson, stopwatch comic timing.

Jackson’s heartfelt wit is a relief. In her essay on mother/son anxieties, she updates her relationship with Casey, who readers met as an asthmatic boy battling pertussis in her book, The Mother Zone. When Casey was 14, she says, he “considered shampoo a culturally imposed artifact.” After explaining “the differences between beaver pelts and human hair, and the fact that sebaceous oil goes rancid,” Jackson was allowed to smell his head before he left the house.

One of the essays promises to speak of that mixed metaphor, abortion, but the writer uses a pseudonym and does not employ hard thinking. The subject is wasted; there are no revelations. Hence my second regret: I’d rather read about the economics of woodcutting than about miscarriage, childbirth, or anything to do with someone else’s uterus. I am a crone by today’s CanLit standards. I have my feminist card punched every year about the time I get my periodontal check-up. But my intellectual passion for reproduction and its piss-offs has passed.

Given so many voices from so many places, I expected to see the essay form batted around like a hackeysack. The fact vs. fiction game doesn’t stir me any more, either, but some of these essays read like short stories and that causes problems. Both Katherine Govier’s “Wild Roses,” a story about infidelity, and a gripping work about the palliative care of a child by Isla James, are confusing for their genre slippages. A piece that attempts to use newfangled e-mail as structural delight is as drab as a bulk e-mail missive from Head Office.

The essays do accumulate into more than the banter of mid-life professional women. Regret #3: I will miss crucial realizations. Many of these women reveal the Prairies: Crozier’s and Butala’s Saskatchewan; academics from Manitoba. Their experiences of family, religion, and Prairie culture, when encountered as mosaic, convey nuances of lives I may never live but nevertheless savour. The true depth of the collection is found in these women’s clear memories and their willingness to share.

Are my frustrations with this brand of anthology mere prickly hormones of mid-life, or are they common among readers? Booksellers and publishers are wiser than I am as to the volume and vastness of their target readerships. And they can be happy, I suppose, that the next time they push a book of musings by women about women for women – even if Atwood yet again contributes the keynote essay – it won’t be me who writes, “I can’t read this anymore.”