Join author Laura Elizabeth Woollett at the Very Small Bookshop, Bristol, to discuss her new book Hell Days: Into the Inferno of Hormonal Mood Disorder.
During this dicussion, Very Small Bookshop owner Leah - who, too, suffers with PMDD - will interview Laura about 'Hell Days', followed by a Q&A and book signing.
This event will be held at Willway Yard. Doors are at 18:45 with the event starting at 19:15.
Entry Requirements: 14+, any under 18s accompanied by an adult
When I think of my hell days, I think of crime scenes. Familiar sites, made uncanny with violence.
In the fluorescent tedium of a call centre in 2018, acclaimed novelist Laura Elizabeth Woollett finds herself meticulously plotting her own death. Until her period arrives, and equilibrium with it. After years of dismissing these monthly turns, she’s diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). Then, at 33, she falls pregnant and experiences a reprieve — but will it last?
Through case studies, interviews, extensive medical research, and forays into history, true crime, and algorithmic rabbit-holes, Woollett looks beyond herself to assemble a chorus of PMDD sufferers, along with dedicated scientists and clinicians. Navigating the impossible terrain between a potentially fatal disorder and treatments that can be almost as dangerous, Hell Days is a testament to the precarity and dignity of life as a periodically suicidal person in an often-brutal world.
Laura Elizabeth Woollett is an author and critic based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her short story collection, The Love of a Bad Man, was published in 2016, followed by the novels Beautiful Revolutionary (2018), The Newcomer (2021), and West Girls (2023). Her works have been listed for numerous awards, including the Stella Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. In 2025, she was a writer-in-residence at the Cité Internationale Des Arts in Paris. Hell Days (2026) is her nonfiction debut.
