ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the accounts that participants gave of their divorce experiences; discusses these in terms of narrative genre, and offers a psychoanalytically-based perspective on the case studies brought 'into conversation' with each other. It also explores the interpretive work of meaning-making that divorcing people do in their narrative accounts. The stories people tell each other are, or can become, part of a culture's stock of narratives which others may draw upon to make sense of their lives and, as Plummer puts it, all stories have their time, their place. At a general level, then, the narrative genres available in a culture provide what may be thought of as outline story structures which people draw upon to make sense, order and meaning, out of their experiences. The narratives shape and are shaped by both cultural and psychological factors; they reflect both cultural preoccupations and psychological constellations and they impact reflexively upon both culture and psychology.
