It is often dangerous to draw close parallels between a writers life and her work: One of the reasons that people write, after all, is that fiction provides them with a chance to create an alternative world, a world in which things may be otherwise than they actually are. But in Bessie Heads story Life the direct connections between Heads own life and her story (and characters) are hard to ignore or dismiss. Running through this story is a sense of isolation, of the many ways in which a person can be exiled, of the ways in which life itself can be seen as a kind of exile.
