Ruth Beecher was interviewed by her eldest daughter Amy. Ruth was born in Cork in 1968, the elder of two children. She describes secondary school, holidays in East Cork, and her social life as a teenager which included drinking underage in pubs and having house parties. Ruth talks about her parents’ difficult relationship. She describes her mother’s depression (following her own’s mother’s suicide when she was in her twenties) and hospitalisation for ‘a breakdown’ after giving birth to Ruth. Ruth describes ‘glorious’ teenage years in Cork, the move to London at the age of twenty in 1989 and life as a new emigrant. Ruth describes her unplanned pregnancy and being an anxious and self-conscious new mother. She talks about her excitement at being higher education at Birkbeck, University of London in the early 1990s and wonders if she would have ever been able to take up those opportunities to self-fund a BA, MA and PhD had university fees been as expensive then as they are today.