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INTERVIEWER
Perhaps the isolation of your childhood helped you to become a writer of all the time it left you for reading—lonely though it must have been.
GORDIMER
Yes . . . perhaps I would have become a writer anyway. . . . An Oxford student who is doing a thesis on my writing came to visit me in Johannesburg the other day. I did something I’ve not done before. I told him, “Right, here are boxes of my papers, just do what you like.” I liked him so much—he was so very intelligent and lively. I would meet him at lunch. He would emerge, and so would I, from our separate labors. Suddenly he brought out a kid’s exercise book—a list that I’d kept for about six months when I was twelve of books that I’d read, and I’d written little book reviews. There was a review of Gone With the Wind. Do you know what was underneath it? My “review” of Pepys’s Diary. And I was still reading kids’ books at the time, devouring those, and I didn’t see that there was any difference between these and Gone With the Wind or Pepys’s Diary.
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