“Hot Flashes and Cold Showers,” Susan McCabe’s recently-published collection of life lessons, is not (as I at first assumed) about menopause.

It’s a memoir told in the form of vignettes, each of which is either about a Hot Flash — the “aha” moment that clarifies some aspect of your life — or a Cold Shower, the dawning horror that you are the problem.

This is only the most recent of Susan’s contributions to humanity, both on and off the island.

During a career with Underwriters Laboratories, she opened testing labs across the US and Asia. She worked to prevent the counterfeiting of that special UL Mark that makes electrical appliances safer for us all.

Locally, she was the Park District’s program director for five years (with a brief stint as the district’s director), during which time she brought Shakespeare to Ober Park and expanded the summer concert series we now all know and love.

She moved on to manage radio/television monolith Voice of Vashon from 2014 to 2018. Since then, she’s been an active part of the Whole Vashon Project and SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice).

Now, Susan has mined this deep vein of experience to share a few universal takeaways.

Her funny and poignant narration takes us through, among other things, a hostile takeover of a drive-through window of a Popeye’s Chicken in Chicago — a Hot Flash experience that made her realize she was more powerful than she had ever imagined. In her essay, “Late Blooming Adventures,” Susan learned the risks of putting vanity over sanity — a Cold Shower.

As with most of us, many of her flashes and showers were dispensed by family members.

The stories are also informed by her years as a female executive in India, in a culture which, in Susan’s experience, showed far less respect for women in power than she was accustomed to in the United States.

I saw Susan perform some of these essays in a one-woman show a few years ago, and watched as audience members took her aside to describe how the stories resonated with their own lives. This inspired her to assemble them into a book, whose alternate title could well be “You’re Not Alone!”

Says Susan: “My hope is that I touch readers will my essays, and that they find a bit of themselves there. If I make people laugh — or cry — my work is done.”

To that, I would say: “Mission accomplished!”

Susan will read from “Hot Flashes, Cold Showers” at 6 p.m. Thursday, March 13, at Women Hold the Key’s Synergy Center, located on the corner of Vashon Highway and Gorsuch Road.

Buy the book at Vashon Bookshop, on Amazon, and at her island readings.

Cindy Hoyt is an island comedy writer and author.