No Cold Kitchen (Roberts's Biography)
Ronald Suresh Roberts published a biography of Gordimer, No Cold Kitchen, in 2006. Gordimer had granted Roberts interviews and access to her personal papers, with an understanding that she would authorize the biography in return for a right to review the manuscript before publication. However, Gordimer and Roberts failed to reach an agreement over his account of the illness and death of Gordimer's husband Reinhold Cassirer and an affair Gordimer had in the 50s, as well as criticism of her views on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Roberts published independently, not as "authorized", and Gordimer disavowed the book, accusing Roberts of breach of trust.
In addition to those disagreements, Roberts critiques Gordimer's post-apartheid advocacy on behalf of black South Africans, in particular her opposition to the government's handling of the AIDS crisis, as a paternalistic and hypocritical white liberalism. The biography also revealed that Gordimer's 1954 New Yorker essay, A South African Childhood, was not wholly biographical and contained some fabricated events.
Read more about this topic: Nadine Gordimer
Famous quotes containing the word cold:
“If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means—from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.”
—Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)