Postmenopause research

My doctoral research was into the embodied experience of postmenopause.

You can access the full thesis here.

For many years I have been interested in the experience of being postmenopausal – what is this like in everyday life, living in the world, in our changing bodies? Partly this is from my own experience, having become menopausal in my mid-30s after cancer treatment, partly it is to do with the silence our culture has around POSTmenopause – the second time in our lives that we are non-reproductive but, unlike childhood, all too often ignored.

I hope that the work I further create from this research will make something that might help all of us, therapists and counsellors included, better understand what it is like to be postmenopausal. This is particularly important as postmenopause lasts from a quarter to a third of our lives, yet is rarely considered in the wider scope of menopause research.

In my interviews I focused on the personal, embodied experience; what is it like to live in the world, in your body? How does it show up for you on an everyday basis? What is it like to be being postmenopausal, for you, now? How have you made sense of this major life transition – a transition that is as profoundly embodied as puberty, pregnancy, parenthood or infertility.

I have now turned the work of my thesis into a non-academic book that Virago (who also publish my fiction) are bringing out in February 2027. It’s titled Being the Change and I’m enormously excited to bring this work to a wider, non-academic audience.