Event overview
Goldsmiths Literature Seminar
'"I'm calling about my mother…you got some of her alive in there." Invisible objects and narrative methodologies in Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.'
Seraphima Kennedy (Goldsmiths)
When Rebecca Skloot convinces Henrietta Lacks' daughter to meet her, she promises to write the truth. The daughter laughs. "Get ready, girl," she says, "you got no idea what you gettin' yourself into."' Skloot's 'braided' biography of HeLa cells interweaves memoir, reportage, science and history, tracing the development of cell culture in the United States from 1950 to the present day. The text intimately reconstructs the life of one woman and her family. Henrietta Lacks is a poor black tobacco farmer from Baltimore who died in 1951, and whose cells were used for medical research without her knowledge or consent. Skloot's aim was for the story to 'read like a novel but be entirely true.' Her distinctive methodology inserts her into the text as 'reporter', 'heterobiographer' (Boldrini), fiction writer and subject, while her narrative echoes both the detective novel and the adoptee memoir. This raises important questions about the role of the memoirist/biographer. Whose story is the story? How do structural choices inform or complicate narratives? Does hybridity guarantee objectivity or unreliability? Can objects create other objects?
'Is writing about the past easier than writing about the present?'
Francis Gilbert (Goldsmiths)
Francis Gilbert will read an extract from his novel ‘Who Do You Love?’ This work deals with a middle-aged man who is looking back at the consequences of an affair he had with a single mother when he was a student during the 1980s. He will explore why he found writing about some sections of the novel harder than others. In particular, he will discuss why he found it relatively easy to write about the past, but found writing a narrative set in the present day more difficult. He will also address some of the struggles which face creative writers, such as the process of drafting work. For Francis, writers can be seen as “aesthetic learners” who generate “aesthetic knowledge” as opposed to “cognitive” knowledge. He sees them not as dealing with the manipulation of facts, but with the manipulation of emotions and sensations. His experience is that writers often find themselves attempting to create “aesthetic effects” whereby they are trying to construct worlds which reorient the ways in which they think and feel when they are not writing.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 28 Nov 2013 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
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