Germs A Memoir of Childhood

A brilliant, meandering exploration of family and childhood memory by one of the most original British philosophers of the twentieth century.

Germs is about first things, the seeds from which a life grows, as well as about the illnesses it incurs, the damage it sustains. Written at the end of the life of Richard Wollheim, a major British philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century, this memoir is not the usual story of growing up, but very much about childhood, that early world we all share in which we do not not know either the world or ourselves for sure, and in which things--houses, clothes, meals, parents, the past--loom large around us, seeming both inevitable and uncontrollable. Richard Wollheim's remarkable, moving, and entirely original book recovers this formative moment that makes us who we are before we really are who we are and that haunts us all our lives in lucid and lyrical prose.

Richard Wollheim (1923-2003) was born in London and educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He fought in France and Germany during World War II and taught philosophy at numerous colleges, including the University of California, Berkeley from 1985 until his death in 2003. He was best known for his philosophical work on art and psychoanalysis and he served as president of the British Society of Aesthetics. He wrote and edited over a dozen books, including On the Emotions, The Mind and Its Depths, On Art and the Mind, and Painting as Art.

Sheila Heti is the author of eight books of fiction and non-fiction, including the novels Ticknor, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be? and the story collection, The Middle Stories. She lives in Toronto.