Storying the Menopause: An Evocative Auto/Ethnography

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 an 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: 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.