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[...] Sometimes I think of asking for it back. But I can’t bring myself: ‘Can I have my book back please?’ No, I am just quite unable to say that. I can buy it again of course, and one day that’s what I’ll do I expect. And as I go along reading it again I’ll underline sentences here and there once …

[...] I vowed not to give or lend him any more books after that and whenever he asked me what I was reading subsequently I would answer most mellifluously, ‘Something that you’d find very dull but that I happen to like a great deal.’ And we’d both laugh at that, which was better than the air turnin…

[...] Showalter’s study argues that cultural notions about how women ought to conduct themselves have made women mad – a point of view I shared, though in a more nascent unspecified form. It was just a feeling really. As I read on this feeling soon began to deepen and darken emphatically and as it …

[...] Strange to think but when I first wrote the tale I hadn’t yet read a single word by Italo Calvino, Jean Rhys, Borges, or Thomas Bernhard, nor Clarice Lispector. I had read Of Mice and Men, and Lolita, and ‘Kubla Khan’, and The Diary of a Young Girl. I had not yet read The Go-Between or Wuthe…

[...] I gave him the stories on a Friday so they were in his home for three nights and two days. Lying there somewhere in his house. Absorbing this environment that I could never go to. His Saturdays. His Sundays. Who was he on those days? What clothes did he wear? Where did he sit? Where did he re…