All the time I was plowing through books on dyslexia, I found myself asking: what if, what if? What if you were a kid the 1950s with this condition, when there were no books on it, when there was no understanding of it. I remember kids in my class at school who just didn't seem to progress in their reading. There was no extra help. People just thought, "Oh, he or she isn't so bright, or they're obstinate."

My husband, William Sutcliffe, the writer, is my first reader and in many ways my most important. That initial reading of the manuscript is crucial and irreplaceable and you want them to approach it as someone in a bookshop might, not knowing much about it. So I've got into this pattern of not telling Will anything about the book I'm working on. He often knows nothing about the book I'm working on at all until I give him the whole manuscript and ask him to read it. The book I'm working on at the moment he knows nothing about. No one does.

When I worked at The Independent newspaper, I had colleagues who would laugh and say that whenever they picked up the phone to my dad and heard his accent, they thought they were about to hear a five-minute warning to get out the building. People in Britain have always thought it acceptable to make racist remarks about the Irish. The prejudice underlying that supposed joke was everywhere.

It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell.

Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?

As you'll know yourself, there are these moments when you're writing a book when one remark or moment will pull everything together and you'll think, "That's it. I've got what I need."

We all have a family, whether we like it or not; we all come from somewhere, and there's something strange in the way you have, with siblings, two or three personalities yoked together for life. You grow up thinking those family relationships are set in stone and then you get older and realize they're not. They're always shifting.