Ballardian Home Movies

I got to the Fifth Estate website from one of the pre-pages of Miracles of Life. I got this book immediately after reading somewhere that its author’s birth-date was just a few weeks before mine! I had also happened to hear J.G. Ballard being interviewed on the Radio. I feel excited by the autobiography, although my life has been quite different from his: I was born in England, and have lived in London all my adult life. I did happen to go to Canada for eighteen months at the same time as Ballard was in Canada. But otherwise no parallels. Now I’m in the situation of wanting to write a biography of my father, a novelist. I have masses of material – chests of letter from him, starting when he was six, and finishing the day before his death in 1975! I feel I must somehow make use of these letters. If I don’t, nobody else will. I’m the oldest of the four sibs, recently widowed and childless. So I seem to be in the ideal position. There are daily letters by my parents throughout their engagement, from 1926 till their wedding day in April 1929. Then weekly letters to his parents. When his children got old enough to read he wrote to us whenever he was away. There are series of letters to friends too. I keep being ready to start the biography, and then get distracted – like now, discovering J.G. Ballard. If he speaks in public again, how can I find out the details?