Recent years have seen a growth in interest in the social sciences in the narrative form and it is the use of auto/biographical approaches that I discuss in this chapter. The narrative turn is also reflected in wider society, in the mass media and popular and policy discourse. My own interest in auto/biograpraphical narratives goes back a long way. In my long experience of interviewing people it became obvious to me that some interviewees decide to tell stories and recount testimonies and memories even when they are not invited to. I began to notice, and became increasingly interested in, the occasions when people broke the rules of the ‘question and answer’ format of a conventional semi-structured qualitative interview and embarked on unsolicited stories (Brannen, 2013).

Let me give some examples. In the very early 1980s, I was employed to do fieldwork for a community study of depression among a workingclass sample of mothers in north London. The four-hour recorded interview included a standardised psychiatric research instrument, the Present State Examination (PSE), in which the interviewees were asked whether and how often they had experienced psychiatric symptoms of depression, anxiety and other disorders, as well as questions concerning marriage, family and other close relationships. Later we had to transcribe and code sections of the recording according to a large set of predefined measures on to different coding sheets. Although the study was about the aetiology of psychiatric illness, the methodology for data collection and analysis was not concerned with women's own understandings and attributions of their ‘symptoms’. The interviews were never fully transcribed and the women's stories were lost.

What struck me at the time, and has stayed with me since then, was the way even the decontextualised questions of the PSE instrument provoked stories about people's lives and did indeed provide insight into the origins of mental illness. Sadly, I have forgotten many of the stories. In one case my memory of the first interview I conducted on the project was overlaid by my shock when the interviewee, a young black British mother, responded in the affirmative to a question that I found difficult to ask: ‘Do you ever feel like you are falling off the edge of the universe?’