I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.

Sometimes I will spend two or three days not speaking to anyone outside of the immediate family when they come home, and then I find that I've been emailing like fury. Once you give in to that silence, it's quite nice.

And, in fact, this is the tale that I would love to write: history is such a romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots. If it would just stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in my head.

I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.

I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead

It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.

If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.