When the word 'nostalgia' was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology - not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.

That powers my desire to write: the sense of how quickly everything on the surface of life can be cut away and you can suddenly be inside the most inner part of the most inner life of a person. What does it feel like there, and what are the regrets and sensations and longings, and what is the music of it?

I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality.

...larger than life...I've never understood that expression. What's larger than life?

The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.

She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.