"My Son's Story" By Nadine Gordimer: Themes and issues in the novel (when private "affairs" become public)

Throughout her career, the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer has wanted to explore the terrain where personal interests, desires and ambitions encounter (and, not rarely, contend with) the demands and trials of a politically active life. She has had a keen eye for the exceedingly precarious moral situation of her own kind - the privileged white intelligentsia that abhors apartheid, detests the exploitation of 25 million unfranchised, economically vulnerable citizens at the hands of five million …

…- she is too busy with her work for organizations including the African National Congress, of which she is a member, and the Congress of South African Writers, which she helped to found and which provides black writers with books, workshops and help in getting published. '' 'My Son's Story' is also about writing fiction,'' she pointed out. ''You know that you know something about people, and then you live alternative lives unobserved.''