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Gallery signs ‘achingly poignant’ memoir of abuse from Gibson
Gallery has signed Seventeen, an “achingly poignant” memoir written under the pseudonym Joe Gibson.
Commissioning editor Alison MacDonald acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Donald Winchester at Watson Litte. The memoir will be published in July 2023.
“When I first read Seventeen, I could not turn away from it – a riveting, achingly poignant and often shocking portrait of a relationship between a boy and his teacher,” said Winchester. “Joe tells the story with grace, empathy and piercing accuracy; it’s a narrative riven by the maelstrom of confidence and naivety that besets many of that age. It’s a pitch-perfect evocation of another era, one not far distant from our own, and its laddish toxic legacy continues to impact us today.”
The publisher wrote: “It’s 1992. Like every other 17-year-old boy, Joe has one eye on his studies, the other on his social life – smoking, Britpop, girls. When his 35-year-old teacher takes an interest in him, it seems like a fantasy come true.”
“For his final two years at school, Joe is bound to her, a woman twice his age, in an increasingly tangled web of lies and manipulation. Their affair, a product of complex grooming and a shocking abuse of authority, is played out in the corridors of one of Britain’s major private schools, under the noses of people who suspected, even knew, but said nothing. Thirty years on, this is Joe’s gripping record of the illicit relationship that dominated his adolescence and dictated the course of his life for 17 years.”
MacDonald commented: “I couldn’t – and still can’t – take my eyes off Seventeen. It’s rare to read, re-read, re-re-read anything and be so newly shocked or moved, but Joe’s evocative rendering of his life-changing relationship as a sixth-former reads like a highly engrossing novel – which makes its truth and trajectory pack a yet more devastating punch. With a heady dose of nineties nostalgia and the perfectly captured mood of those final months at school, Seventeen raises serious questions about power imbalance, safeguarding practices and shame. It has been a word-of-mouth hit in the office, and I can’t wait to see the conversations it sparks on publication.”
Gibson added: “I am thrilled and honoured to be publishing Seventeen with Simon & Schuster. I began writing this memoir in 2011, but it has taken more than a decade to complete. Only since participating in The Truth Project, part of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, have I been able to properly analyse long-hidden secrets and accept the impact on my life of this abuse of authority. I have brought my experience to the page to help empower those whose stories have been buried to speak and be heard.”
