Scotland has always been independent. We have our own legal system, our own culture; I don't see the issue. We are different and I think we should celebrate those differences within the union. I can see what would be lost, but don't necessarily see what would be gained by breaking away. What does upset me is that I can't vote in Scotland.

I cut a lot of cringy sex stuff and a lot of stuff I thought was too personal. I think secret gardens are very special. I think we all have to have them. I think the secret of memoirs is keeping those parts of yourself off the page, which makes what you do share more valuable.

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are very often not really what happened. And as I started to write stuff down, I started to challenge what I thought I knew about myself, my culture, my family, all of it. It was a huge, destroying process that completely took over my life. I just wasn't here, I mean I was physically present, but I wasn't here, I was back in the 1980s.

I had to do things to myself on the page that had been done to me in real life. I had to try and drown myself in the bath. You have to do that. And the impulse is to rescue yourself and to spare the reader, but I can't rescue myself. And why should I spare the reader when nobody spared me? It's telling people what happened.

I do feel a responsibility. It's a privilege to be able to speak about it, but I don't speak for all gay people.

You don't realise how much you're holding onto until you start to let go of it. I had had loads of therapy and thought I had come to terms with who I am, but there's something in the process of writing that unlocks other experiences, other emotions and you have to be prepared for that.

The hardest bits of my book to read were the easiest bits to write because they were the most immediate. Probably because I had never stopped thinking about them on some level. Those bits I was just channelling and those were the most exciting writing days. The bits I found harder were the bits that happen in between, you know, the rest of living. There were whole years, whole houses, that I just got rid of.