For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
“Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.”
“My mother was kept very busy with her sewing; sometimes she would have another woman helping her.”