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» Book Reviews » Features » Short Stories
| FEATURES Lyndall Gordon, award winning Biographer - and Feminist Ruth Bradbury-Horton
Award winning biographer Lyndall Gordon was recently in Cape Town where she was kind enough to agree to an interview to discuss her re-released Book, Shared Lives: Growing up in 50’s Cape Town. This beautifully written memoir cum semi-biography tells the story of three young women, her friends, who died tragically, well before their time. Explaining the writing process and the friendship she shared with her special friend Romy, she also offers a glimpse into her passion, that of the talents and representation of Women in society. I first asked what it was like to write about her friends and family as opposed to writing about other people as she has done in the past. “I just decided to write this for myself and see if it was publishable. To me it was a kind of a literary adventure, I’d written Biographies about the great, like TS Elliot, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Bronte. It was a departure to write about what I like to call the lives of the obscure. So the idea was to take the methods of writing about the lives of the great and apply them to ordinary lives. I was moving away from traditional biography. My theory was that ordinary lives should be as interesting as great lives, and the problem is that with ordinary lives is that you don’t normally have material. You have to have material to do this. l kept diaries when I was a teenager, but I also had letters from friends, because I’d lived away and so I had material, and so it was possible to look at life, ordinary life. By ordinary life I don’t mean that I think they were ordinary people, I think that these 3 women were extraordinary. The whole challenge is to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, because I believe all ordinary lives have something extraordinary if you just ask questions.” Writing about ones friends and family can never be easy; there is always the question of permission. Lyndall explained how she approached this. “[What must be remembered is that] legally letters belong to the writer. So Romy dies, I’ve got loads of her intimate letters from over the years but actually she owns them. Now she’s died so her next of kin, her husband Winston owns them, and it was a very uneasy thing for me because would Winston want me to do this or did he not want me to. I said to Winston I would change some names, and I fictionalised something’s. I invented dialogue; I would never have done that in Biography proper, where you would never quote anything that isn’t actually verifiable. There are things in the book that the reader won’t know, but I know are fictionalised where the material is rather delicate. I did say to Winston, Romy’s health issues, do you want it fictionalised, do you want your name changed and he said, “ I had to fight so hard to marry her I want everyone to know”. That was his answer. So he has been exemplary, he’s been very sensible, it’s not easy for him but he allowed it.” I actually interviewed people with the possibility [the book would be] published but I wasn’t sure. I am a writer who does write professionally [and so they should have been aware of the likelihood of the book being published]. [The book] was actually accepted very quickly, and then I think they were a little taken aback it was really going to be published. But what I did was I sent proof copies to the men, it was really the men, the husbands where there was an issue. Would they really want this personal stuff to go out? They all agreed.”
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