Wednesday 28th May
6.30 to 9pm
Tom Lee remembers the local psychiatric hospital from his childhood. Inspiring rumours and dread, it was a place where the strange and deranged were kept away. But among those people were, at different times, Tom’s own parents. 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 had a crisis of his own and found himself returning to the past for clues.
The Bullet is the 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.
Tom will be in conversation with author and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen.
'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
'[A] fragile and unforgettable memoir' Frances Wilson, Spectator
Tom Lee is the author of The Alarming Palsy of James Orr, a novel, and Greenfly, a collection of short stories. He lives in South London and teaches at Goldsmiths.
Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in private practice in London. He is professor emeritus of modern literary theory at Goldsmiths University of London. His latest books include Losers (2021) and All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World (2024).