Storying the Menopause

Storying the Menopause presents a kaleidoscope of multifaceted lived experience, offering a diverse and illuminating range of stories that foreground often hidden voices, thereby expanding our understanding of the menopause in twenty-first-century UK. Menopause is different for everyone, as evidenced by the stories within this book - many stories speak of despair, difficulty, loss and pain, but they also speak of uprising, liberation, freedom and release. Everington takes an evocative auto/ethnographical approach, using life writing and reflection to explore the author's own personal experience and the experience of others, connecting these autobiographical and biographical stories to wider cultural, political and social understandings of menopause. Offering a body of collaboratively produced testimonies, drawing on interviews and a range of interdisciplinary approaches, this topical book is recommended for anyone interested in gender and women's studies, life writing studies, the sociology of reproduction, the sociology of ageing, creative non-fiction writing approaches, oral history and ethnography studies.

Shanta Everington is Associate Lecturer and Honorary Associate at The Open University, UK, where she gained her PhD in Creative Writing, specialising in life writing. A creative and critical writer working across a range of forms, Shanta specialises in creative practice as socially engaged research. Previous books include the following: Another Mother: Curating and Creating Voices of Adoption, Surrogacy and Egg Donation (2023), XY (2014) and Marilyn and Me (2007). She is a Writing Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund and a member of the National Association of Writers in Education.

Part I: Introduction; 2. Contextualising the menopause; 3. How auto/ethnography is used in the book; Part II: The interview stories; 4. Maria's story: Early menopause; 5. Kim's story: HRT as a cancer survivor; 6. Yasmin's story: POI and ADHD; 7. Tammy's story: Not fitting the dominant narrative; 8. Hannah's story: Perimenopause and mental health; 9. Josephine's story: Breast cancer after 5 years on HRT; 10. Grace's story: Menopause in the workplace; 11. Cara's story: Menopause, identity and sexuality; 12. Ivy's story: Menopause and disability; 13. Jyoti's story: Menopause and cultural taboos; 14. Kathleen's story: Hysterectomy and sudden menopause; 15. Ajay's story: Menopause and non-binary gender identity; 16. Shanta's story part 2: What happened next and how the other stories speak to mine; Representation and Resonance; 17. Contributing to new understandings of menopause through an evocative auto/ethnographical approach to the co-creation of stories