Public Lecture: Tom Lee, The Bullet

in Conversation with Kate Kennedy

In this lecture, Tom Lee will discuss his memoir, The Bullet, in conversation with Dr Kate Kennedy.

[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 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.

Kate Kennedy is a biographer, cellist, broadcaster, and leading scholar of twentieth-century music, lecturing in Music and English at Oxford University. She is Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, a Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her latest book, Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound (2024), explores the lives of cellists who endured persecution and misfortune, while her acclaimed biography Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney (2021) won the American Musicological Society Prize. A prolific author and regular BBC TV and radio contributor, she received Oxford University’s Vice-Chancellor’s Prize for Excellence in Public Engagement with Research in 2017.