Germs A Memoir of Childhood

A brilliant, sinuous 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 his life by Richard Wollheim, one of the major philosophers of the late twentieth century, the book is not the usual story of growing up and getting on but a brilliant recovery and evocation of childhood consciousness and unconsciousness, an eerily precise rendering of that primitive, formative world we all come from in which we do not know either the world or ourselves for sure, and things—houses, clothes, meals, parents—loom large around us, as indispensable as they are out of our control. Richard Wollheim’s remarkably original memoir is a disturbing, enthralling, dispassionate but also deeply personal depiction of a child standing, fascinated and fearful, on the threshold of individual life.

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.