Tom Lee, ‘The Bullet’

In this lecture, Tom Lee will discuss his acclaimed new memoir, The Bullet.

In The Bullet, Lee explores both his own and his parents’ experiences of mental illness. Like many people, Tom Lee remembers the presence – somewhere out of sight, on the outskirts of town—of the local psychiatric hospital. It was a place that inspired jokes, rumours and dread, a place where the strange and deranged were kept away. But among those people were, at different times, Tom’s own parents.
Afterwards, those times were not much spoken about and before long the hospital closed, as part of the nationwide shutting down of psychiatric institutions. For many years, Tom believed that he had dodged the bullet of the mental illness that had marked the lives of his parents. But then, quite out of the blue, he has a crisis of his own and finds himself returning to the past for clues. The Bullet is an attempt to piece together and understand what happened to his parents and what happened to him. It is also a story about how we have tried and spectacularly failed to care for people suffering with mental illness, and about the terrifying fragility and unknowability of the human mind.

Speaker Details:

Tom Lee is the author of a memoir, The Bullet, as well as a novel, The Alarming Palsy of James Orr, and Greenfly, a collection of short stories. His fiction, essays and journalism have appeared in Granta Magazine, The Paris Review, The Dublin Review, Esquire Magazine, and The Guardian, among others. He has won the Society of Authors Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s Brookleaze Grant and has been shortlisted for The Sunday Times Short Story Award, the largest prize for a single short story in the world. Tom lives in South London with his family and teaches at Goldsmiths.