She Left Me The Gun: video

I’m here talking about my book, in London and as I travel around Johannesburg, where some of the story takes place. The book is out in the UK in a few days….click on the still to get to the video. (That’s my mum in the bonnet, looking up at her parents, with Bonza the dog in the foreground. It’s the only photo of that brief family that exists, which is why it always annoyed my mother that you couldn’t see her face).

And here’s the excerpt from the book, running alongside the video in Guardian Weekend:

My mother first tried to tell me about her life when I was about 10 years old. I was sitting at the table doing homework or a drawing; she was standing at the grill cooking sausages. Every now and then the fat from the meat would catch and a flame leap out.

She had been threatening some kind of revelation for years. “One day I will tell you the story of my life,” she said, “and you will be amazed.” I had looked at her in amazement. The story of her life was she was born, she had me, 10 years passed, end of story.

“Tell me now,” I’d said.

“I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

I knew, of course, that she had come from South Africa and had left behind a large family: seven half-siblings, eight if you included a boy who’d died, 10 if you counted the rumour of twins. “You should have been a twin,” said my mother whenever I did something brilliant, like open my mouth or walk across a room. “I hoped you’d be twins, with auburn hair. You could have been. Twins run in the family on both sides.” [Continue reading here]