5 November 2018
Written into our culture is the idea of the writer as adventurer, or the writer as rake. It isn't enough that a person should strive to write interesting things. They ought also, we feel, to have an interesting life: to flash and yearn and travel intemperately, to artfully unspool (but how, I wonder, do they ever get anything done?).
I am-insofar as I am anything at all-a writer of fiction: a maker-up of things, someone who repurposes, taking elements of reality and twisting them out of shape. I also have two small children. A garden. I do a lot of washing, and go to bed at half past nine. Where creative transports ought to go, there are only 500 solid words on the page each morning and the nursery run. I am ashamed.
