Gurus, artists and exiles

The introductory Apologia sets the scene: ‘These chapters are potentially autobiographical: even when something didn’t actually happen to me, it might have done … The central character — the “I” of each chapter — is myself.’

My Nine Lives is subtitled ‘Chapters of a Possible Past’ and that is what we are given: variations on a theme of displacement, the search for love, and the often painful gaining of knowledge.