In this lecture, Tom Lee will discuss his acclaimed new memoir, The Bullet in conversation with Dr Charlie Lee-Potter. 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.
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.
Dr Charlie Lee-Potter is an award-winning writer, artist, and broadcaster, with a background in English Literature and Fine Art, and a deep interest in blending soundscapes, spoken word, and creative storytelling. Her projects include the podcast Inside A Mountain, shortlisted for the International Women’s Podcast Awards, and her visual artwork, which focuses on the lives of forgotten women, has been exhibited in the UK and USA. Currently, as writer-in-residence at Oxford’s Wytham Woods, she is creating a work of creative nonfiction exploring the lives of women living alone in forest.
