’Memoir’ Jackie Kay and Gillian Slovo in Conversation with Robert Downes

A sold out event recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 28 November 2012 The Relational School (of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy) and the Freud Museum are holding a series of intimate evening forums addressing the subject of memoir from the perspective of how writing and publishing has come to affect the individual’s experience of their own story. Conveying a life illuminates profound aspects of our human story and our struggles to situate ourselves and to belong. As organisations concerned with the meaning and impact of reflection, we are delighted to welcome these esteemed memoirists to join us in conversation and reflection upon what it means to have shared their history in this way. Jackie Kay is a Scottish poet and novelist. She was adopted into a white Glaswegian family where her father and mother were also communists and full time political activists. In 2010 she published ‘Red Dust Road’, an account of her search for her birth parents, a white Scottish woman and a Nigerian man. Gillian Slovo is a playwright, novelist and memoirist. ‘Every Secret Thing’ is an account of her childhood in South Africa where her communist parents were significant figures in forbidden anti-apartheid politics. Both of these memoirs are poignant accounts of the way in which the personal is woven in with great social movements of our time. Robert Downes is a psychotherapist, supervisor and teacher of body psychotherapy. He is a member of the Relational School executive committee