Women, Pleasure and the Gambling Experience: 16 Years On

At the age of thirty-seven, She realized she'd never ride Through Paris in a sports car, With the warm wind in her hair.Marianne Faithfull, "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan"Women, Pleasure and the Gambling Experience, my first monograph, published in 2008, has gained a reputation over the years as being one of the primary studies of women's "everyday" domestic experiences of gambling.It explores the entanglements of class and gender among a group of working-class women as they used gambling as part of their attempt to navigate their way through a hostile and precarious society.In this commentary piece, I will reflect on the book and describe what it meant to me as a young woman early career scholar writing about gambling in the mid-2000s.I will explain something of the wider political and scholarly landscape that underpinned the book's conception, my experiences of its publication, and how the book fares within the contemporary field of gambling studies.Publication of the book coincided almost exactly with the birth of my first son.I arrived home from hospital with my baby, aching, leaking, exhausted, and tearful on the very same day that a box containing copies of my book arrived from the publishers.My dad excitedly held up a copy.Sadly, I couldn't have been less interested.Birthing a baby is often used as a metaphor