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This sounded like a fascinating true story – which it is. Celebrated poet and dramatist, Lemn Sissay, spent his formative years as a foster child and in care where he experienced almost-unimaginable emotional cruelty and neglect.
He has spent much of his adult life working to uncover his true identity (he is of Ethiopian descent), together with a quest to understand his origins and unusually bleak early life.
The problem Janie and I had with this event – a cross between a book launch and a rehearsed reading and an interview – here is a link to the Royal Court blurb – was the sycophantic nature of the audience. The audience/atmosphere encouraged Sissay to freewheel and jump around through his material so much that it was difficult to get to the nub of many of the excellent points he was trying to make.
It didn’t help when his lectern collapsed right at the start. Miranda Sawyer as Chair didn’t really help either as she, bless her, was almost as “all over the place” with the buzz of the fans as was Lemn Sissay.
The nadir came during the limited time for questions at the end, when a friend of Lemn Sissay’s took up a question slot in order to blurt out that she loved him. Even Lemn responded to that one by saying to her, “why don’t you just give me a call to tell me that” and Miranda said, “that’s a comment, can someone else please ask a question?”
Actually the questions were quite good and did help to cover many of the gaps from the preceding hour.
If you want to learn as much about this fascinating book/story in 10 minutes as we learnt in the 90 minute sycophant-fest event, then I highly commend this Guardian article/book review published a few days earlier – click here.
Are we glad we went? On balance, yes. Lemn Sissay is an engaging personality and he has such a troubling-but-interesting story to tell. I’d really like to have a quiet chat with him one day; I suspect he comes across better when he doesn’t have a mob of fans to please.