My success at senior high school and later at university was sustained mainly by my boundless curiosity and my admiration for a cosmopolitan range of fiction and non-fiction writers, as well as talented and knowledgeable teachers and university professors. While some might describe it as innate bookishness, I believe it was curiosity that turned me into an avid reader of books on various themes and disciplines that interested me in the course of my life.31 Without such curiosity and the enriching rewards that accompany the study and writing of life stories, for example, my academic and professional career might easily have taken a different course.

In the limited number of formal interviews I have given on the place of biography in my career, many questions have been asked. Among these are whether there is a link between my academic interest in biography and the practice of clinical psychology; what the personal and subjective reasons are for the selection of biographical subjects; and, more specifically, whether my knowledge of clinical psychology plays a role in the biographical rendering of people's lives, and whether I identify psychologically and in other ways with the subjects I select for biographical study. Interviewers have also asked questions about my academic work in the 1980s, the 1990s and the first decade of the present century, the years during which my biographical studies of three prominent black South African exiles were undertaken.

My answers to such questions were given in the context in which they were raised. But taken together, it is as if the interlocutors were interested in the journey I had made from hard-core academic psychology research at the beginning of my career to a near-lifelong preoccupation with the question of exile and biography in the lives of some remarkably talented black South Africans.33 To provide an account of how such a development came about, I will retrace my steps to the 1970s to examine the kind of research and writing I carried out in the early stages of my career as a clinical psychologist. I can do this confidently because, in the course of work on this book, I embarked on the demanding self-imposed task of reading the bulk of my academic articles, my collections of essays, my monograph, and my biographies of Es'kia Mphahlele, Gerard Sekoto and Dumile Feni.