Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and this week I'm very pleased to be joined by the poet and playwright Lemn Sisse, whose new book is a memoir called My Name Is Why, or possibly My Name is Why.

You have to read to the end of the book

to find out how to pronounce that title. Lem, welcome. This book begins, it doesn't quite

begin with Lem Cicester. It begins with a boy called Norman Greenwood. Tell me a bit about

Norman Greenwood. Who is he? Well, Norman Greenwood is named after the social worker who gave me to foster parents and said to the foster parents, his name must be Norman.

You know, there are many things that you're going to change in him, like any parents, but you can't change his name.

His name's Norman.

They wanted to call me Mark.

After Mark in the Bible, so my name became Norman, middle name Mark Greenwood. So that's how I became Norman, I guess, but I was always my original name, the name that was on my birth certificate. So legally, I was not

Norman Mark Greenwood, only I didn't know. And I think my name is why. It's about the search for a

name. And your situation, I mean, for readers you don't know, listeners you don't know, you were

born to an Ethiopian mother in Wigan, wasn't it?

That's right, yeah.

And how did you come to be fostered?

What was the, you know, what turned you initially, circumstance-wise, into Norman?

1967, 68 was a time of great adoption, the great adoption drive, really.

Women were coming over from Ireland who were pregnant

without a husband. In the late 1960s, if you were pregnant and if you didn't have a husband,

you were the equivalent of an estrogen terrorist. And you had to be contained. Otherwise,

you would explode and the moral compass of society,

the church and state would fall to pieces. And so these mother and baby homes were set up around

...