Videos, Gallery and a Story with its Head in the Clouds: On the Other Side of Shame Launched

by Rene on Jul 24th, 2008

The cover of Joanne Jowell‘s On the Other Side of Shame features a work of art by Kim Lieberman that expresses, as Pan Macmillan’s Terry Morris said at the book’s launch last night, “the subtle but perpetual ripple effects” of our actions – the way people reach out to one another, connect, sometimes even when facing the wrong way.

On a Sunday night in 2001, a doctor in Seattle named Antony reached out by placing a call to his biological mother in Cape Town, whom he had never known. The story of connections, coincidences and reunions within reunions that unspooled from that moment is a story packed with goosebump material, to borrow a phrase from the author’s launch speech.

Joanne Jowell certainly had her audience spellbound as she related some of the episodes in her book. Try this one on for size: Antony’s biological sister attended his wedding without knowing their true relationship. She’s all over the wedding video!

Of all the special guests who attended the event – an affair that filled the capacious courtyard of the St John’s shopping centre in Sea Point – only one could claim a right to sit beside Jowell and sign books. Lynette Langman is the woman who took the call that day in 2001, a woman who literally passed through to the other side of shame, after giving birth to Antony out of wedlock when she was just seventeen. She named him David, but didn’t have him long: her parents, part of Cape Town’s conservative Jewish community, made her give the child up for adoption. The book narrates, in Lynette’s, Antony’s and others’ voices, the happy collisions that resulted decades later as a consequence of that decision.

One mystery remained: How did Langman and Jowell – the latter of whom had been looking for a good story to tell – find each other? Quite incredibly, through that much-celebrated medium of communication, the haidresser, in this case the well-known Wayne Gates of Mouille Point. (He was naturally at the launch, too – he’s pictured at left.) It further turned out that Langman and Jowell were in fact related, Langman being Jowell’s mother’s first cousin.

Pan Macmillan is pleased to bring you a reading from On the Other Side of Shame and two further video clips, plus a gallery of snaps from the occasion:

Video: Joanne Jowell reads from On the Other Side of Shame