In a very full interview, edited and revised by both participants, from an exchange between Alan Hollinghurst and Hermione Lee which took place at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College Oxford on 7th February 2012, the novelist and the biographer discuss The Stranger’s Child and the topics arising from that novel in relation to life-writing: the private and the public life, families and secrets, the effect of idealisation and sentiment in the evolving versions of a life-story, changing ideas of privacy in twentieth and twenty-first century life-writing, the suppressions and distortions which biography entails, the use of documentary materials in biography, censorship, sexuality, and biography, the effect of Lytton Strachey (and his biography) on the history of gay writing, and English literary traditions.