I am revisiting memories, documents, and texts I have written about my childhood and formative years, principally in apartheid South Africa, and about the life that followed.
I have undertaken this literary experiment in sustained collaboration with artificial intelligence. I remain the author and ultimate editor of the project.
The materials include childhood recollections, school records, family photographs, historical documents, my earlier literary works Fashioning the Curve and Me Three, scholarly writings, and an expanding record of exchanges with AI.
Through reading, rereading, questioning, and sometimes disputing these materials, we are exploring how they might illuminate, contradict, unsettle, or transform one another.
The collaboration itself has become part of the experiment. AI can prompt forgotten recollections, suggest unexpected connections, and open new possibilities of interpretation. But it can also misremember, invent relationships, impose coherence, and confidently reconstruct events that never happened. My responses, corrections, and challenges become part of the record.
One question continues to animate the undertaking:
What happens when an adult asks a machine to help him revisit the boy he once was—a boy shaped by the languages, institutions, and contradictions of apartheid South Africa—while recognizing that neither the adult nor the machine can fully recover that earlier consciousness?
[updated 19 October 2026]