For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.
I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.
People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.
The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion – ‘Everything’s great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it?’ Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel.
The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that others are demanding to be given it back – to be ‘taught’ – is disturbing.
An eating disorder epidemic suggests that love and disgust are being jointly marketed, as it were; that wherever the proposition might first have come from, the unacceptability of the female body has been disseminated culturally.
A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common – the desire to write – could almost be considered meaningless.
Parenthood, like death, is an event for which it is nearly impossible to be prepared. It brings you into a new relationship with the fact of your own existence, a relationship in which one may be rendered helpless.
We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.
Modern morality is all about perception.
Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.
It’s a pretty brutal process, having a baby.
It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
Having your second child, in case you were wondering, is a lot harder than having your first, except for those people who find it easier. I’m afraid I don’t have the latest figures to confirm this.
Hope is like one of those orchids that grows around toxic waste: lovely in itself – and an assertion, if you like, of indefatigable good – but a sure sign that something nasty lies underneath.
What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
Society in the English countryside is still strangely, quaintly divided. If black comedy and a certain type of social commentary are what you want, I think English rural communities offer quite a lot of material.
I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.
I don’t go to church any more, but I think that Catholicism is rather like the brand they use on cattle: I feel so formed in that Catholic mould that I don’t think I could adopt any other form of spirituality. I still get feelings of consolation about churches.
Human beings have a need, generally, to destroy things. The Freudian principle of civilisation is correct. There’s always, always a difference between the family image and the reality.
I’m waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.