I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

It's been said that the men in my books have been absent, or weak, or creepy.

I find the past so fascinating. Photographs are strange, almost surreal, almost here yet gone. I slip into thinking what the past must have been like and I enjoy creating that ambience and atmosphere - 1730 to around 1870 is the most interesting period.

She doesn't believe in dogs," Bridget said. "Dogs are hardly an article of faith," Sylvie said.

Become such as you are, having learned what that is.

Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.