Public Lecture: Tom Lee, 'The Bullet'

In this lecture, Tom Lee will discuss his acclaimed new memoir, The Bullet in conversation with Dr Charlie Lee-Potter.

[A] fragile and unforgettable memoir

—Frances Wilson, Spectator

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.

A bold, brave and clear-headed account of the affliction of crushing anxiety. Tom Lee writes with great humanity; I felt - and lived - every word of it’

—Benjamin Myers, writer and journalist

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.

The Bullet offers a deeply moving personal account of what it is like to live with mental illness, the terror and mystery of why and how we break - and it also grapples with the politics of mental health care

—Sophie McBain, New Statesman

Speaker Details:

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, lecturer, artist and broadcaster. She holds two doctorates, one in English Literature and the other in Fine Art. As the former presenter of BBC Radio 4 programmes such as PM, The World at One, Open Book and The World This Weekend, Charlie has a particular interest in the combination of found sound and the spoken word. For her podcast Inside A Mountain, shortlisted for the International Women’s Podcast Awards, she blends soundscape and music to evoke the atmosphere of walks with guests such as international cellist Natalie Clein, poet Ian McMillan, and mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. As an artist, Charlie uses printmaking, sculpture, assemblage and fibre arts to create visual narratives about the lives of forgotten women. She has exhibited in both the UK and USA and, later this year, has a solo show in Bath.

Charlie is the winner of the International Créateurs Design Prize for Creative Journalism for her work on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Her publication, Writing the 9/11 Decade: Reportage and the Evolution of the Novel (Bloomsbury), shortlisted for the University English Book Prize, examined the way novelists and artists struggled to represent the attacks of 9/11 in creative form. Her chapters for the book These Islands: A Portrait of the British Isles explored the idea of using geometrical shapes to walk city streets. Charlie is the current writer in residence at Oxford’s Wytham Woods where she is writing and illustrating a work of creative nonfiction about women who live alone in woods and forests.

Further Details and Contacts:

This hybrid event is free and open to all; however, registration is required. This event will be recorded.

After the event, join us for a complimentary wine reception and purchase a copy of The Bullet from the Caper (@caperoxford) pop-up bookshop.

Any queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.