‘Part Fable, Part Porridge’: Professor Jackie Kay and Dame Professor Hermione Lee on Writing the Self

Jeniam Conversations

For many theorists of autobiography, the form assumes a self that can be known and a life that can be accounted for. But how do you write an autobiography when your origin and identity are unknown, uncertain, or multiple?

Such questions have animated Professor Jackie Kay’s poetry and prose memoirs, including The Adoption Papers (1991) and Red Dust Road (2010). Born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, Kay was adopted as a baby by a white communist couple in Glasgow. Her writing asks how the self is made: through blood, through stories, and through the communities and landscapes that claim us. It also confronts the challenge of how to write a self shaped by imagination, song, and the fierce love of the family who chose her – a self she describes as being ‘part fable, part porridge’. In so doing, Kay probes the nature and possibilities of life-writing itself.

In conversation with Professor Dame Hermione Lee, Kay reflects on writing Red Dust Road, on what prose autobiography offers the life-writer that poetry cannot – and vice versa – and on the relationship between self-knowledge and narrative form. Their discussion will also consider the ethics of life-writing, the challenge of writing about living people, and what it means to tell a story that is also, inevitably, someone else’s.

The conversation will appeal to writers, readers, and scholars of life-writing, as well as to anyone drawn to questions of identity, family, and the stories we tell in order to become who we are. No prior specialist knowledge or preparation is required.