For years I have had a post-it note stuck to my office computer monitor. A phrase jumped out from a book proof in my postbag one day and the idea seemed important enough to keep by my side as a reminder, so: LOVE IS THE SHAPING AXE I wrote in caps. My personal life at…
If I write this, before I know it I won’t be not-writing any more: I’ll be writing again. It’s been so long since I put words together into sentences and those sentences into something that isn’t a business email, I’ve become nervous of it – but right now it’s easy to be nervous of everything…
It has been six months now since I held my vintage Jean Rhys omnibus in my hands: the one that sits by my bed in Brooklyn. I left my battered childhood copies of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and my childhood copy of 101 Dalmatians there too: loving gifts from one home to another. Banned from…
So here we are, lying low to the wall, as John O’Donohue wrote in the poem that was read on Radio 4 last week: behind our windows, stirring slow pots of comforting things, eating more beans than usual, baking or planning to bake, holding our pets or our kids or our pillows close and watching,…
As book people shall we recognise that last year was an important year for storytelling? For personal storytelling, because 2017 was a year in which many people’s stories were spoken out loud or written down for the first time. I am referring of course to the accounts given by those who have suffered sexual harassment…
I keep a number of half-formed essays in the Drafts folder of my blog, adding to and weeding through my ideas every now and again. I have revisited none so often as this piece of writing about sadness, which has grown long and wild over the past two years and yet never blossomed into something…
The first property we bought was a disaster. It was a flat with the most beautiful floor to ceiling windows. It should have been a lovely home, but there was a problem, in the building. I moved in with my mother to try to escape it, while my husband painted walls through the night so…
I spent this weekend reading. I read for hours in bed, in the bath, by the fire, on trains, at the kitchen counter, in bed again, on the stairs with a cup of coffee, in the bath again, bed, bed, lovely bed. I did other things too – well, I mothered – the house went…
Another year is turning: Time is drawing attention to itself again, bragging about how fast it's passing. Some days I let it swing by, grateful; but I ought to catch hold of its coat. In a few months I'll be forty-five. My teenaged daughter watched me getting dressed the other day and commented, pointedly: "You…
I met with an editor of commercial fiction recently who had plenty of ideas for novels she wanted to commission. They were okay set-ups; each one had a decent premise, or character idea at their heart. The ideas all took inspiration from something that had already been successful, in books or on TV, and then combined that plot or…