She wanted to say, no. She wanted to say, I have a son, there is a child, this cannot happen. Because you know that no one will ever love them like you do. You know that no one will look after them like you do. You know that it's an impossibility, it's unthinkable that you could be taken away, that you will have to leave them behind.

She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.

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.

Something that had an enormous influence over my relationship with language was my stammer. I had a really bad stammer in my childhood and adolescence, and that imbues you with two things. First, a hyper-sensitivity to grammar, because a stammerer will have problematic sounds, impossible verbal stumbling blocks. Second, writing is just such a joy when you have a problem with speaking. It's so astonishing to watch language coming out of your pen without any hesitation or dysfluency.

You need a lot of energy to get a novel finished. You need an ability to ignore everyone around you. It's why I don't read my reviews any more. I know a lot of people say that, but I really don't read them.

Spending a lot of time away from home was strange. My parents visited me, obviously, but I was in hospital a lot, alone. And then when my health had improved a bit and I was in a sick-bed in the house, with the life of the house going on around me, that was very vivid for me. I always think that's a bit like the position of a novelist in a novel, going through drafts: there but not there, one remove from reality.

As other authors have realized, heat can have a strange effect on us, can cause odd chemical reactions in the brain. Heat can bring out secrets; it can change people's personalities.