Book Festival review: Trio of women who write all wrongs

Published on Tuesday 12 August 2008 02:00

IT TURNS out that Katharine Whitehorn is chairperson Ruth Wishart's journalistic icon. At 80, one can see why: one of the forces who was at the vanguard of feminising Fleet Street and is currently Agony Aunt for Saga gives good chat as she discusses her autobiography, Selective Memory – so named, she tells us, for the old adage "if you can look back on life with contentment, you have man's greatest gift – selective memory".

Hers is a life of contentment, career success and love, unravelled in rich Roedean and Cambridge-educated tones and peppered with the Brit-side Dorothy Parkerisms which made her columns so cherished.

A revelatory and enjoyable trip down memory lane.

Sibyl Le Fleur tag-teamed with her son, Derek Flory, in revealing the stuff of their fairy-tale memoir Torn Apart, the story of Sibyl's emotional reunion with her sister Blanche in 2007, after 66 years separation due to the Japanese bombing of Rangoon.

Sibyl escaped, married a Scot and raised a family, painfully unaware of the whereabouts of her Burma-residing family.

Thanks to a genealogy course and a little help from Google, son Derek brought about their reunion and documented it all for posterity. A heartwarming, seeming fictional, tale, Sibyl held court with the smiling charm of The Ladykillers' Mrs Wilberforce, while Derek expounded enthusiastically upon the joyous resurgence of memories suppressed.

The Scotsman's own literary editor, David Robinson chaired this International Pen event with "resident alien" Yiyun Li, Beijing-born and living in the United States, selected as a Granta Best Young American Novelist, and recipient of multifarious other awards.

She began by reading at length from her tender upcoming novel The Vagrants, due out next year, and flowed forth into conversation about her mother's sage advice ("keep a zipper on your mouth"), the freedom of writing about her motherland in English and the musculature of teaching creative writing, making this a gently mind-opening event.

AL Kennedy riffs about her mother too, with quite different results: namely that all the prizes one ever wins are vindicated in the light of a mother's reticent praise.

A comely hour, in which a sharp tongue was always firmly deployed with charming cheek, Kennedy's take on the travails of being an international writer of exotic repute were refreshing, comic and never far from self-deprecatingly oddball.

What do writers think just before they receive a ("major literary") award? They are blinded by flashlights, convinced they won't win and horrifically unprepared for speech eventualities.

Ending on a crescendo of praise for the power of words, Kennedy had a packed Main Theatre hanging on hers.