SeniorWomen.com's Editor's Note: Nadine Gordimer died Sunday, July 13, 2014 at age 90 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Your novel Burger's Daughter portrays a family deeply involved in the liberation struggle in South Africa. How did you come to write it?

Nadine Gordimer: I knew many activist families. And I began to see — I was still fairly young myself, my children were small — that if you were the child of such families, and I can think at once of two or three, you were brought up in an atmosphere where the struggle came first, and you as a child — a young boy or girl — you came second. And indeed you were groomed, so to speak, politically groomed into the struggle. And I wondered and wondered, knowing many of them, how they felt about it. So how shall I put it? I put myself into that position to see, and that's how it came about. I also waited a long time to do it, because I thought, I am not in this. I'm neither a parent nor a child. I'm waiting for somebody to write it who would know more about it than I did. Nobody did, so I did. And it's only later that some of those children who were part of that grew up and wrote it. But I did it in the way I've described.

Did you ask any of these people to read Burger's Daughter before it was published?

Nadine Gordimer: I never asked anybody. I never have and still don't. I've written all my books, the main part, in this house, and my husband was extraordinary. He never asked to see what I was writing. It was not part of our intimacy. He was the first person to read the book when I finished it, but he never saw a word and I never talked about it to anybody while it was being written. That's just the way I worked.

We've read that you were actually waiting to visit a friend in prison when you first had the idea.

Nadine Gordimer: Yes, yes, that's true. I was going to see Bettie du Toit. And there were some other people, some young and others older, with their clean clothes or whatever it was.

Was there a particular young girl you saw there?

Nadine Gordimer: Yes, there were several young girls. I really don't want to talk about it because that's my business. I don't go further.

Burger's Daughter was banned by the South African government. Could you tell us about your experience with censorship?

Nadine Gordimer: I had three books banned, and an anthology I put together of poetry by black writers.

Did you anticipate that certain books of yours were going to be banned?

I knew Burger's Daughter would be banned because I even put in it — the movement, sometimes scattered little pamphlets in the street, you know, which were swept up. But I always picked these things up, and I think I put one almost in its entirety in the book, so that would be enough for it to be banned. What else could you do? If you are a writer you must write what you see, and what you know, and what you've come to know, and what's happening around you.

Were you ever given a reason for any of your books being banned?

Nadine Gordimer: Yes, indeed.

I did something that nobody else had done, because I figured — which book of mine? I think it was, it might have been The Late Bourgeois World. Or was it Burger's Daughter? No. I then asked the censorship board the reasons. And of course I consulted with my lawyer friends whether I was entitled to this, and indeed it turned out that within, I don't know, two weeks or something of the banning order, you could apply. But if it was any later... So I did it very quickly and I got the opinions of these people on why the book was banned. And indeed then, I had a friend at the University of Witwatersrand, an Afrikaans lecturer there, but he and other friends were doing a little secret kind of little publishing venture of anti-apartheid literature. And to do this as an Afrikaner was not easy, believe me, even less easy than for the rest of us, and we talked about it and they agreed -- I think he may have even suggested it — that I should write what happened in court, which I did, and there's this little booklet, which is called What Happened to Burger's Daughter. So it was Burger's Daughter, yes. And it was then printed. They did it, and it was given to book shops to give away free to people who bought books there. So it was the only way of distributing it.

 And I'm so glad that we did that and indeed, asking them for their reasons. You want to be read, and you want to be read by your own people, right? I was writing in a world language, and my books were published in England and America and all over the place, but my own people couldn't read the book, except those who smuggled it in, in the covers of fairy stories or something.

How were you notified that your book would be banned?

Nadine Gordimer: Well, you're not notified. It just gets gazetted. It was in the government gazette. And then you make an appeal to the board. I hardly knew that the appeal existed, but my lawyer friends knew about it. There was this cut-off point so I hurriedly made the appeal in a letter of course, yes.

What was the impetus for making the appeal, just frustration?

Nadine Gordimer: Oh, no.

Because we felt, "Who are these people who are banning our books?" And remember, I had got the reasons, yes, and one of the reasons was that a child is going around a church and there were pictures. You might have remembered if you read the book, there's an unusual Christ on the cross, and here he was dark, dark hair or something. And the child said, "No, that's not Jesus. Jesus has got blond hair," and so on. And so the parents who were taking her around said, "You know, this was in the Middle East, and it's very likely indeed that he was very dark. So not blue-eyed and blond at all." And this was blasphemous. For God's sake! Or in any of the gods'!

So Burger's Daughter was banned for blasphemy, of all things.

Nadine Gordimer: Yes. That's why the book that we put together was called What Happened to Burger's Daughter, which means that was what happened to it. It had gotten banned, and the reasons for the banning were for everybody to read, which nobody had read for anybody's book before. They just were thrown away. I think then that my friend André Brink was inspired, as you would say, to do the same with a book of his that was banned.

You mentioned that people in America, England and other countries were able to read your books, even when they were banned in your own country. Are you conscious of writing for a particular audience?

Nadine Gordimer: No, no. I write for anybody who reads me.

Do readers ever tell you about things that they've found in your books? Does that ever influence your writing?

Nadine Gordimer: No. They tell me sometimes, but it doesn't influence my writing.

Do you think a writer has a responsibility to push cultural limits, in a given country, or in a given era?

Nadine Gordimer: I'm looking more from the point of view of justice in the country, rather than the cultural side, but I suppose it all comes into it.

Albert Camus, who is one of the great writers that did mean a tremendous amount to me and still do -- unfortunately dead as you know — he said, and this is engraved somewhere in me, "The day that I am no more than a writer, I shall no longer write." Because you can't just live in an ivory tower. This doesn't mean to say that you write propaganda. That's a task for people directly in politics. And indeed, for a writer to begin to be a propagandist is the death of the talent that that writer has. But you are not only a writer, you are also a human being living among your fellow human beings in your society, in your country. You're enclosed by the laws of that country. You're enclosed by the morals and attitudes of the people around you. You have to be in relation to that as well, take your responsibility of being a human being in a human society.

You were born into a very particular society. Can you tell us a little about your childhood? Where were you born?

Nadine Gordimer: I was born in a little gold mining town called Springs. There was no spring around, I don't know why it was called that, and I spent my school days there. I grew up there.

Did you have any siblings?

Nadine Gordimer: Yes, I had one sister.

Could you tell us about your parents, Isidore and Nan?

Nadine Gordimer: Well, Nan was my mother and she came from England as a child with her parents. My father came from Latvia, from some tiny little village somewhere. So they came from very different backgrounds and they were very different people.

Were you named after a family member?

Nadine Gordimer: No. My mother went to a dancing exhibition of some friend of hers who was a dancing teacher. There was a little girl there who danced beautifully and who was called Nadine. She was pregnant and she decided that if she had a daughter again — because my older sister was already there — she would call her Nadine. So that's how I got my name.

So your father was from Latvia and your mother was from London. Was religion a big part of your childhood?

Nadine Gordimer: No. They were both Jews, but my mother was an agnostic and my sister and I didn't have any education as Jewish children. My father used to go to synagogue on occasion, fasting and days like that, and to honor his parents and the anniversary of their death, but that was all. I went to the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy, a Catholic convent school, and nobody tried to convert me to anything.

Did you find that a difficult experience, going to an all-white all-girls Catholic school?

Nadine Gordimer: Well, Catholic had nothing to do with it. Perhaps if I'd had a Jewish education, it would have meant something to me. The fact that it was all white...

You must remember that I was born into a society where there was no question of "mixed" pupils at schools. But I early on began to realize how artificial our life was, and indeed to think, "Well, I go to this school..." of course it was all all-girls as well — and on Saturday, great time, pocket money and after the movies — no black could go to see a film. And I just as a small child presumed they were not interested and didn't like it, it was not for them. But the most important thing was that I was made, by my mother, a member of the children's library when I was six years old, and became a great reader, and very soon left the children's department and took what I liked from the adults'. And I realized later in my life, this was my education, really, because I became a great reader and I had the library. We were not rich and nobody could have bought enough books to satisfy my desire to read. If I had been a black little girl, I couldn't have used that library. It was closed to black people, a municipal library. So there you are.

Who did you find inspiring as a young person? Was your mother an inspiration to you?

Nadine Gordimer: I don't like this word "inspire." I think you have to find what wakes up what is latent in you. You may admire someone else, but to inspire suggests that you want to emulate them or be like them. You cannot be like anybody else, not even the great writer or the great actress that you happen to admire. I think that, again, I come back to books. My desire to understand life, to explore it, came through literature, through reading. And I always tell aspiring young writers, "Forget about creative writing classes." You can't teach people to write poetry or novels or short stories. You can teach them to be good journalists, that's another thing. But you cannot teach them literature this way. And the only way you can teach yourself is to read, read, read. Not in order to emulate or copy what you read, but to become self-critical, to look then at your own little efforts and think, "My God! Look what this one and that one can do with a word that I haven't even touched yet."

Can a young writer without much life experience be a good writer? What makes a good writer?

Nadine Gordimer: It's a combination of life experience, what's happening around you, the kind of society that contains you, and your development in yourself, your emotions, your relations with other people.

Going back to your school years, were you a good student?

Nadine Gordimer: No, not particularly. The teaching wasn't very inspiring.

Do you wish that you had a better education as a young person?

Nadine Gordimer: I wish only one thing, and that is that I had learned an African language. We have 11 languages in South Africa and of course we were taught, as whites, only English and Afrikaans, but not an African language. But I reproach myself now, because why didn't I learn one when I grew up? But by then of course, any excuse. I was concentrating, as a writer must, on the language that he or she is writing in. But I still, that is my great regret that I did not learn an African language, and that I did not see to it that I learned when I was adult.

In that first municipal library, what were some of the books that you just couldn't get enough of?

Nadine Gordimer: Well, it was amazing, because in the children's library they were obvious. For my generation, it was Hugh Lofting's Dr. Doolittle. I did pass it on to my children and their children.

But, as soon as I moved into the adult library -- and my mother was a friend of the librarian, who was a woman, so nobody stopped me -- and then I read an amazing variety of things. Some history, some translations from Greek, a bit of Sophocles and so on. And then my parents had friends whom they used to go every weekend to play cards there -- and I went along. And then I would be left alone -- and the man, who was a lawyer -- in his study, and he had quite a good library. And it included the -- of course banned -- Lady Chatterley's Lover. But I read Lady Chatterley's Lover when I was about 12 years old. And there were many other books of that nature.

Are there any other titles that come to mind?

Nadine Gordimer: Well of course I read Dickens, and very soon I discovered Tolstoy, War and Peace.

At age 12?

Nadine Gordimer: No, bit older, about 13 or 14. And so it went on. Then E.M. Forster, Passage to India, and of course some poetry. Though at school we'd had Wordsworth stuffed down our necks, but then I moved on obviously to contemporary poets of my time.

When you were a little girl, did you put on shows or do impersonations for family and friends?

Nadine Gordimer: No. I think I used to mimic other people rather nastily, my mother's friends who came to -- I don't know whether it was a book club or what it was. I would listen carefully and then I could reproduce for other people's amusement, which wasn't a very nice thing to do. But I think quite a good training for a writer, because as a writer you have to project yourself and indeed you have to use the vocabulary and the turn of phrase of characters who are very different from you. So this was a kind of training of this projection.

So this observation was part of your training?

Nadine Gordimer: I think if you ask what the qualities of a writer are, you have to be born extremely observant. That is really the beginning of it. Because as Graham Greene notably said -- when people asked, "Are your characters based on people?" -- the answer is no, if you're a real writer, unless you choose a particular individual. You choose Napoleon and then you write a novel about his love life, you know, then you recreate it. But in general, what Greene said, and that I think is absolutely true and I found in my own life, he said, "You are sitting in a bus or in a queue, you are waiting to go in at the dentist and there are people there." First of all, you have to have big ears. You eavesdrop. You catch a word here and there. You see that there's a quarrel brewing perhaps, in the restaurant, and a love affair brewing somewhere else, and a case where one dominates another. You see these people and you read their body language and you create alternative lives for them.

Your first stories were published in the children's section of the Sunday paper. How did that come about?

Nadine Gordimer: Obviously, my parents got the Sunday paper and there was this large spread that was the children's section. And then they invited children to send things in. And I was already, from the age of nine, scribbling away. So I wrote a story which had something to do with the rainbow and what was found at the end of the rainbow and sent it in and it was published. But my first adult story was published when I was 15, in a liberal journal that was on at the time. And of course they didn't know that this was written by a child. And what a great moment when, indeed it was November that year when the paper arrived, and there was my story printed and I was even paid for it.

That must have been a really exciting moment.

Nadine Gordimer: It was a great moment, yes.

Were your parents supportive of your ambitions?

Nadine Gordimer: Well, fortunately for me, I think I could have been ruined by being made a child prodigy. It was just a moment, you know, Nadine amusing herself. At that time, until I was 11, I was a passionate dancer, at dancing class. Of course I had the right build for it, being very small and light, and my ambition was to be a dancer and I wasn't bad. But fortunately for me, I changed ambitions or I would have been really over and done with long ago now.

What happened when you were 11? Why did you stop dancing? Was it your health?

Nadine Gordimer: Yes, and it's a very curious thing, because I had some very common condition that I've discovered since, to do with the thyroid gland, which happens sometimes when you're on the brink of adolescence and all your glands are starting to throb and come up. For reasons that I shouldn't go into, my mother's marriage and so on, she clung very much to her children, and she made a tremendous thing of this, and the first thing I was made to give up was the dancing, which was a great deprivation for me.

So you didn't want to give up dancing?

Nadine Gordimer: Well, of course not, but she said I had a bad heart. I've lived now to this great old age with that same old heart, so I'm afraid it was a mistaken diagnosis.

What about your middle years at school? Was your health a factor there as well?

Nadine Gordimer: She took me out of school, and then I had to be taken every day to a retired school teacher. So all on my own I learned my lessons, which again was a great deprivation, without my friends. Anyway, I've survived.

Your family home was raided by the police when you were a teenager. Do you recall that experience? Were you home at the time?

Nadine Gordimer: That was the experience that led to one of my very first stories, yes, the second or third adult story. And not only that, it led to my understanding of how we were living as privileged whites, even though we were not rich, compared with what the real situation was in the country. Because indeed, in the middle of the night there was a row going on in our yard of our house, and my parents and I got up. My sister had already left home. I think she was married or something, or she was at university. She became a teacher. And we went out and there was the woman who worked for us, and who — you know so very well the old American South situation, you know. Here was "White Mama" and "Black Mama." So Black Mama, they had rifled her room; they had turned her mattress over. They were looking for illegally brewed beer, and of course there was a lot of illegal brewing around. I don't know whether — Letty her name was — whether Letty brewed. Why should she not, on the side? But fortunately, it was nothing there that night. But everything was thrown out all over the place, even outside the room into the yard. And we stood there, my parents and I, and the police were there, black policemen under the direction of a white policeman doing all this, and my parents didn't say to the police, "Where is your warrant to come into the house and do this?" I mean, they just walked into the property because they were doing the right thing. They were trying to stop black people from brewing. So I began to think about that afterwards, and then to look at many other things in our life.

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