The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was 'high-strung' - intensely neurotic - yet a charismatic personality nonetheless.

As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people. At the bottom of every page, I'd put a strange scribble. I was emulating adult handwriting, though I didn't actually know how to write.

My writing is full of lives I might have led.

This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.

'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not only of poor and immigrant workers but of their young children in factories and mills - and as the consequence of race hatred in the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves.

My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.

Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.