New book, Storying the Menopause, out by OU Creative Writing researcher

Storying the Menopause: An Evocative Auto/ethnography by OU Creative Writing researcher, Dr Shanta Everington (with foreword by Dr Jess Moriarty from the University of Brighton) is out now with Routledge. 

This is Shanta’s second book with Routledge, with her first book, Another Mother: Curating and Creating Voices of Adoption Surrogacy and Egg Donation, published in 2023, as a research output from her practice-based PhD in Creative Writing. Building on the research methodology developed during her PhD, Storying the Menopause uses writing as a method of enquiry, writing to gain insights and make connections between ideas and experience, this time applied to exploring the menopause.

Shanta says her aim for this project was ‘to explore my own menopause story and a diverse collection of others, using an intersectionality lens, focusing on often underrepresented experience including: early menopause; surgical menopause; LGBTQIA+ experience; non-binary experience; working class experience; menopause and cancer; disability, neurodivergence and mental health; cultural perspectives from the global majority and more! It's an interdisciplinary text that may be relevant to academics across a range of disciplines.’

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 life writing studies, creative non-fiction writing approaches, oral history, ethnography studies. gender and women’s studies, and the sociology of ageing.

About the author

Dr 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. She is a Writing Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund and a member of the National Association of Writers in Education.