I am not up to this. I am not capable. I thought I would be, but I'm not. Some part of me is missing, and I cannot do this.

I think you’re amazing,’ someone says to someone else, but it doesn’t matter who, because they’re all amazing really. People are amazing.

She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.

To have had fame, even very minor fame, and to have lost it, got older and maybe put on a little weight is a kind of living death.

Sometimes, when it is going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary.

But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel — independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.

But how can you not like music? That's the same as not liking food! Or sex!