Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.

I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic - if we can call it that - between high and low. Maybe it's because I was not born or brought up in affluence.

I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.

I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.

I no longer protect myself from the world I grew up in. Rather, today I try to protect the feelings I have for that world, the emotional space where my desire to write first took hold, and still grows.

Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.

At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.