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Last night, V sat beside me on the kitchen couch and took my bare feet on his lap and told me what he really thought about ‘Recording Angel’—that it was ‘a very strong story’, but that O would have been shocked to read a description of himself at his lowest, in hospital after that dreadful operatio…

It was a warm summer night and we talked for a long time without quarrelling. V said he had to have ‘an asbestos suit on’ in order to criticise my work. We came at this vexed topic from several angles, lying on our bed beside the open windows. I said, ‘I know I’m hypersensitive and unpleasant. But …

The characters that people I know become when I write about them are, to me, almost totally separate from the people themselves, once I’ve finished the piece of work and put it aside, or published it. It’s as if I’ve extracted or borrowed from the real person the aspects of them that I needed to st…

A heaviness, around the heart. A heaviness in breathing. I keep running through details of the story, trying to ‘be him’ and ‘see it through his eyes’. Is it a vengeful story? Not as far as I can tell, in my present state of awareness. Does it give a complex picture of my relationship with O? Yes. …

The book rolls forward at its own rate, acting as a black hole that sucks into it everything I think, witness, overhear and see on TV. Today, instead of trying to perfect each paragraph before I moved forward, I thought, ‘Fuck this! I’ll keep barrelling on.’ Hours passed in big bursts and I ended u…