Auckland Libraries

In her striking work of creative nonfiction What Lies Beneath, novelist, short story writer, scriptwriter and playwright Elspeth Sandys shares her voyage into memoir and its complex relationship with memory. At Going West in 2015, Sandys was joined in conversation by old friend and Festival founder Murray Gray. Eloquent and humorous, she talks of her search for an emotional truth, uncovering the story of her birth parents, reimagining the past and the power of the landscape. Elspeth declares that she is fascinated by what we forget, and that who we are is largely conditioned by what we forget as much as what we remember. Elspeth Sandys has had many names. Born Frances Hilton James in 1940, she became Elspeth Sandilands Somerville on the occasion of her adoption into the prominent Dunedin Somerville clan at the age of nine months. The circumstances of her birth and adoption, and their impact on her childhood, are the subject of the first volume of her memoir, What Lies Beneath. While Elspeth was happy a