Charleston - Making Trouble

Michèle Roberts first came into my life about ten years ago. It was a stiflingly hot summer and I was shut away in my room with flu, feeling languid and resentful. Then a friend gave me a book and I read it cover to cover in a few hours. It was an almost physical experience. The story of an intimate female friendship in an evocative rural French landscape, there were endless descriptions of food that I felt as though I could smell and taste. The book was ‘Daughters of the House’ by Michèle Roberts, and later I learned that these were the trademark touches of her work. Finely rendered prose that betrayed her major influences: her dual nationality - she is half French - her memories of a Catholic upbringing, her ‘old-fashioned feminism’ and her belief that ‘women should love each other’. The themes that Roberts herself once summed up as “food, sex and God”.
Now for the first time she has written a personal memoir of her feminism, her life and politics, and tonight she comes to Charleston to speak about it alongside Lynne Segal. “Actually I did write a sort of mini memoir once”, Michèle tells me later over the phone. “I included it in a book of short stories called ‘During Mother’s Absence’, but nobody realised it was about me. It’s much more difficult writing about real life. You have to be much less honest”. Hints of her early political days were given in her first novel, though, (‘A Piece of the Night’), in which the young protagonist joins a 70’s commune and learns to find a political voice through writing. “Some of that was me”, she says. “But there were a lot of things that were made up to serve a point. This is very different”.
Lynne Segal, who shares the bill tonight with Roberts, is a high-profile academic.