Margo Jefferson and Colin Grant: Constructing a Nervous System

Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System has been shortlisted for this year’s Rathbones Folio Prize. Find out more about the non-fiction shortlist here.

Margo Jefferson, author of On Michael Jackson and Negroland, was at the shop to talk about her latest book Constructing a Nervous System (Granta). It’s a memoir unlike any other, taking as its focus each ‘influence, love and passion’ which have gone to shape Jefferson as a person: her family, musicians, dancers, athletes and artists, and one which, in Maggie Nelson’s words, ‘takes vital risks, tosses away rungs of the ladder as it climbs’. Vivian Gornick describes it as ‘one of the most imaginative – and therefore moving – memoirs I have ever read’.

Jefferson was in conversation with Colin Grant, author of Homecoming and director of WritersMosaic, a platform for new writing and an initiative of the Royal Literary Fund.