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The day I realised my novel was going to be a short one, and that its domestic subject and setting were quite proper, I walked home from work and passed a print shop, in the window of which stood a copy of that van Gogh painting of the inside of his bedroom: floorboards, a bed, two cane-bottomed ch…

What is the point of this diary? There is always something deeper, that I don’t write, even when I think I’m saying everything.

What is the point of this diary? There is always something deeper, that I don’t write, even when I think I’m saying everything.

The Age asks me to review Beatrice Faust’s book Women, Sex and Pornography. I file a piece in dialogue form that I really enjoyed writing. They reject it. Would I please rewrite it as a straight review. Rage and contempt. Cutting potatoes and onions, I reflect on the pain of rejection, and on how l…

I want to tell the truth, confess that the moment Guido asked me to go to Venice, I had decided to accept. I’ve never had the candor to admit it, even in this diary. Otherwise, I would have to acknowledge that the effort I made to forget myself for twenty years has been in vain. I succeeded until t…