It’s been one of those lazy days where you feel as though nothing gets accomplished. Having said that, I did just finish Gillian Slovo’s Every Secret Thing. It’s an astounding memoir: a look at the lives of two of South Africa’s most committed anti-apartheid activists, Ruth First and Joe Slovo, through the eyes of their daughter. The tension Gillian develops between her respect for her parents’ devotion to their cause and the consequent emotional neglect that she tries so desperately to reconcile is so poignant. She does an incredible job of incorporating an historical account of the ANC and the anti-apartheid movement, first within and then from outside South Africa, both through a child’s-eye view of her parents’ involvement in these events and through more impartial accounts that educate the uninformed reader. Struggling to deal with her mother’s murder (a mail bomb sent to her university mailbox) and her father’s death from cancer, Gillian weaves autobiography of her own life with biographies of her parents’.

It’s refreshing to be able to read such modern life writing in this Writing from Life course alongside eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction. These autobiographies are a breath of fresh air after Richardson’s Clarissa, and I’m really enjoying the issues we bring up in class. It’s just the writing exercises that seem rather daunting. I try to reassure myself that I’m not a terrible writer, just not a very practised one. But I think I might be kidding myself. We shall see, I suppose.

I have an apple something-or-other over-baking in the oven so I must stop writing.