"The Tower is a matryoshka doll of a book, which starts with this papery outer layer and, by way of Katherine Mansfield, Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung, illness, girlhood and more, peels back these different skins to reach the real, inner story: that of the author, denoted here as simply T. The former Times Literary Supplement editor's follow-up to Dandelions - a hybrid of family memoir and cultural history spun out around the central thread of Lenarduzzi's grandmother - also flexes the parameters of fact and fiction."
"Thea Lenarduzzi was once told a story about a girl, Elizabeth Annie, who was locked in a tower and destined to perish there a few years later. The story went that the girl was diagnosed with tuberculosis by her medical father, who decided she should be tended to in this purpose-built edifice on his estate. Like the tower which still stands, the story persisted, becoming the focus for a swathe of local myths and legends. Only as it turns out - and it's no great"
The Tower layers family memoir and cultural history to reexamine a local myth about Elizabeth Annie, a girl supposedly locked in a tower and diagnosed with tuberculosis. The narrative moves through references to Katherine Mansfield, Walter Benjamin and Carl Jung, illness and girlhood to peel back successive 'skins' and reveal a personal inner story denoted as T. Research appears as a refraction of preexisting mindsets, and life becomes narrativised when filtered through fiction. The work probes the porous boundary between fact and fiction and considers how a storyteller's imperfections shape the stories they relay.
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