Masculinity and Memoir - Blake Morrison on Family Life

Blake Morrison’s award-winning, bestselling memoir ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’ is an honest and intimate portrait of family life, father-son relations, and the impact of bereavement. Since it came out in 1993, Blake has continued to revisit his family’s past through ‘Things My Mother Never Told Me’ (2002), and is ‘still working things out’ in his poignant recent book ‘Two Sisters’, about his sister Gill and half-sister Josie, published earlier this year.

In this episode, Blake reads extracts from ‘Two Sisters’ and ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’, and we explore with him key themes in his work, including: sibling relationships; family secrets; men controlling women; male violence; transitions in father-son relations; youthful rebellion, and becoming a man. We also discuss issues around men, emotion and grief, the genres of ‘sib-lit’ and ‘dad-lit’, and the impact of feminism on Blake’s own development and writing. 

As well as a memoirist, Blake is a poet, novelist, and journalist. His published work includes the poetry collections ‘Dark Glasses’, ‘The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper’ and ‘Shingle Street’, and most recently, ‘Skin and Blister’, and four novels, including ‘The Last Weekend’ and ‘The Executor’. He’s a regular literary critic for the Guardian newspaper and the London Review of Books, and is Professor Emeritus of creative and life writing at Goldsmiths University. Born in Yorkshire, he has lived in South London for many years. 

• Find out more about Blake: https://blakemorrison.net
• More info about ‘Two Sisters’: https://www.boroughpress.co.uk/products/two-sisters-blake-morrison-9780008510527/
• ‘Things My Mother Never Told Me’ https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/357294/things-my-mother-never-told-me-by-morrison-blake/9780099440727
• ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’: https://granta.com/products/and-when-did-you-last-see-your-father/
• Blake’s ‘Top 10 books about fathers and sons’: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/nov/02/top-10-books-about-fathers-and-sons-blake-morrison-and-when-did-you-last-see-your-father

We cover the following in this episode:

• Reading from 'Two Sisters' (01:24-06:42)
• Blake’s motivations for writing the book (06:42-08:14)
• Why brothers don’t write about sisters (08:14-10:12)
• Examples of ‘sib-lit’ (10:12-11:47)
• The impact of alcoholism on Gill (11:47-13:46)
• Alcoholism and gender (13:46-16:04)
• Male violence and the efforts of adults to hide it (16:04-19:18)
• The significance of women in Blake’s life (19:18-21:02)
• The supposed stability of 1950s/60s family life (21:02-22:22)
• Reading from ‘And When Did you Last See Your Father?' (22:22-26:09)
• Why the book was so successful (26:09-27:47)
• The extent to which Blake’s portrayal of fatherhood was culturally specific (27:47-30:21)
• ‘Dad-lit’ and other authors to read on father-son relations (30:21-32:28)
• Shifts in Blake’s relationship with his dad and how he saw him (32:28-34:41)
• Blake’s capacity for writing honestly and sensitively about emotion (34:41-37:21)
• Where Blake himself fits into his memoirs (37:21-39:39)
• Gender and dealing with grief (39:39-41:25)
• Why Blake kept his Dad's pacemaker (41:25-43:46)
• What led him to write ‘Things My Mother Never Told Me’ (43:46-46:43)
• The impact feminism had on Blake and his writing (46:43-50:32)
• The influence that poetry and literature can have on young men (50:32-55:03)