Kid Gloves: A Voyage Round My Father
- Submitting institution
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Goldsmiths' College
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 2734
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Penguin
- ISBN
- 9781846148774
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- June
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Work on this memoir began in 2012 as part of the author’s teaching practice. Kid Gloves wasn’t written in one breath, but presents itself as a continuous piece of text, without pauses bigger than paragraph breaks, to model and encourage a continuous deferral of judgement. It was carefully crafted to contest the prevailing norm of memoir, with its empty rhetorical search for final resolution by devising a non-linear form, experimental but reader-friendly. The tone needed to match, flexible, unauthoritative, in order to resist the power balance of the genre, in which the writer always has the last word.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The filial memoir is a familiar genre whose arrival in its modern form can be traced to Edmund Gosse’s 1907 Father and Son, a sharp self-administered corrective to the more conventional, even reverent life of Philip Henry Gosse he had published in 1890. Kid Gloves revisits this territory with modest but far-reaching formal and tonal choices. The book’s construction is non- and even anti-linear, developing themes with a smoothness made necessary by the abstention from section breaks. Everything remains suspended rather than forced to a conclusion, with emotions resisting pat resolution, as they do outside of books. _x000D_
_x000D_
My father was a public figure of sorts, a prominent judge of conservative but not predictable opinions, and the book needs to place him fairly, not just as a representative of homophobia and the fight against permissiveness, whole-heartedly though he embraced those causes, but as a product of a god-fearing North Wales small town in the early twentieth century. Professionally he inhabited the evolving culture of the law but also actively contributed to it by giving landmark judgements against the police, not decisions typical of a careerist or seeker after the approval of his fellow judges. _x000D_
_x000D_
More important from a reader’s point of view is the balance of elements from page to page. The dead can’t defend their dignity, and it follows that a decent majority of the jokes and comic passages should be at my expense. Life writing necessarily includes an element of performance – memoirs that ignore or deny the fact tend to be the least successful, in their laborious and self-invalidating authenticity. In Kid Gloves I foreground the element of performance, and show – I hope – a clear preference, as between the two hallowed ways of taking risks while staying safe, for wit over irony.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -