Between the ages of 8 and 12 it was difficult to know what my father was saying, and he moved very slowly, and then he died.

I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.

I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.

I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.