Henrietta Lacks biographer Rebecca Skloot responds to US parent over 'porn' allegation
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Version 0 of 1. Writer Rebecca Skloot has hit back at a Tennessee parent who is trying to have her acclaimed biography of Henrietta Lacks removed from local schools, saying the complainant is confusing “gynaecology with pornography”. Knoxville news station WBIR reported that Jackie Sims, the mother of a 15-year-old boy at Knox County Schools’ L&N Stem Academy, had objected to Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks when he brought it home as part of his summer reading. Her son has now been assigned a different text, but Sims is attempting to get Skloot’s biography of the African-American whose cancer cells – taken from her without her knowledge and which subsequently changed modern medicine – pulled from all Knox County schools. “I consider the book pornographic,” Sims told WBIR, citing a passage in which Skloot imagines Lacks discovering a lump in her cervix: “With the door closed to her children, husband, and cousins, Henrietta slid a finger inside herself and rubbed it across her cervix until she found what she somehow knew she’d find: a hard lump, deep inside, as though someone had lodged a marble just to the left of the opening to her womb”. Sims also objected to a passage about Lacks’ husband’s infidelity. “It could be told in a different way,” Sims said. “There’s so many ways to say things without being that graphic in nature, and that’s the problem I have with this book ... I was shocked that there was so much graphic information in the book.” Skloot, writing on Facebook, said that “Just in time for Banned Books Week,” a US-wide celebration of the right to read which takes place at the end of the month, “a parent in Tennessee has confused gynaecology with pornography and is trying to get my book banned from the Knoxville high school system”. Skloot pointed to the “many other local parents” who disagree with Sims, and to the “other schools throughout the US” who support her biography, saying: “I choose to focus on those stories, and I hope the students of Knoxville will be able to continue to learn about Henrietta and the important lessons her story can teach them. Because my book is many things: It’s a story of race and medicine, bioethics, science illiteracy, the importance of education and equality and science and so much more. But it is not anything resembling pornography.” Reviewing the book for the Guardian, novelist Hilary Mantel wrote: “Rebecca Skloot revivifies Henrietta, studying her not only as the originator of her cell line but as a woman embedded in history. Her absorbing book is not just about medicine and science but about colour, race, class, superstition and enlightenment, about the painful, transfixing romance of being American.” Skloot was later contacted on Facebook by Jimm Allen, assistant principal of the school attended by Sim’s son, who told her: “Know that the book and teachers have the complete support from the administration of the school. It’s an amazing book that fits with our Stem curriculum better than almost any book could. The next book that the sophomores are reading? Fahrenheit 451... Oh, sweet, sweet, irony.” Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel about a world in which books are burned has been the subject of repeated attempts to ban it since it was published in 1953. “I keep joking with my friends that this is a big *You Know You’ve Made it When* moment for me and the book,” wrote Skloot on Facebook. “I’m in great company on the list of books people have tried to ban.” |