This is not the first time that I have written about myself within my academic writings. Indeed, anyone interested in my work, should they want to, could easily discover many of the significant biographical events of my life, both personally and career wise. I came to higher education later than many and began my first degree in the late 1980s when I was 28. Following A-levels (I was lucky to get the two I did considering the amount of bunking off I did during sixth form) I studied to be a nursery nurse and then worked for six years, first in a postnatal ward of a large city hospital, next in a university day nursery and finally as a private nanny. Following 15 or so months of attempting pregnancy and a miscarriage at 16 weeks I felt unable to work with children for a while and took some typing jobs to fill my days and earn some money. Bored and un-stretched intellectually I went to my local FE college to see what evening courses were on offer and there began my love affair with all things sociological. I couldn’t get enough of studying or of sociology and the effect it had on the way that I felt about the world and my place within it. The class was on a Monday and there were two TV programmes on later in the evening; one following a couple through their first year of marriage and another focusing on individuals who had survived in difficult circumstances. I’d rush home to catch them, watching them with new, enlightened eyes. This was the start of the development of my ‘sociological imagination’ (Mills, 1959). In this first year of sociological study I also became much more interested in the experience and consequences of personal politics and my exploration of and relationship to feminism also began at this time. A year later I began my BA Sociology at North Staffordshire Polytechnic (now Staffordshire University).

From the very first day I knew that I wanted to find out more about areas and concerns that I felt were misunderstood and under-researched and planned for my final undergraduate research project to concentrate on women’s experience of miscarriage. My auto/biographical focus continued into my doctoral career where I focused on the status and experience of ‘infertility’ and ‘involuntary childlessness’ (which I write in single quotation marks to highlight the problems of definition).