I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?

I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.

The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, she's asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it's her equality that's fake.