Tissue

About the Book

Tissue is both an autobiography and a comment on the autobiographical process. The first part describes a life lived in four countries: British India, the British colony of Kenya, England and Australia, and the consequences of the end of colonialism for a child that was inadvertently part of it. It also describes a return to Kenya in 2003 to find a lost farm, and a lifelong search for a lost mother and her family in England. The second part of the book looks at some of the ideas around autobiography that may be taken for granted: issues of memory, identity and time, and cultural narratives that may affect the ways in which autobiographies can be written.

About the Author

Dr. Sally Berridge had a Kipling-esque beginning. Born in the foothills of the Himalayas, she is a daughter of the Raj. During the war her mother died in Calcutta from typhoid, so she was sent ‘home’ to boarding school in England at the age of seven to be adrift in a strange country. Then, with her father, an inarticulate (though verbose) ex-Indian Army colonel, and a duty-bound step-mother she went to live on a farm in colonial Kenya in a position of privilege that was empty of loving care. She returned to England for university studies and eventually migrated to Australia in 1966. The turmoil of her early life, the gaps in her family history and the effects of four migrations induced her to write her story.