I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

Try to be accurate about stuff.

I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.

For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.

Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.

I am a trembling mess from hip to knee. There is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig my fists between my thighs. It is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief that is almost genital.

Having kids is very difficult to do on your own, and it's really crazy difficult to think you're doing it as a team and to find out that you're not actually part of a team.