Activity

To Paul Crossley’s piano masterclass at the Con. After three hours of intense concentration I was completely exhausted. His teaching was very challenging. He was not a giver of praise or even of encouragement, except to one girl who played Ravel; everyone else played Debussy. I loved the language h…

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…

I went to work and broke through a brick wall or went round the side of it or dug under it or something: Athena’s moral crisis and flight. The pace picked up incredibly. Present tense. A weaving and twining of many a disparate thread. All these years of note-taking, of being what Joan Didion calls …

If I were a man of a pre-feminist generation, with a wife to provide my meals and clean my house and bring up my children, perhaps I would have a free mind for the large thought, the unlimited plan; and free time for night work, for hours without the necessity to think ahead about trivia—will we ha…

I don’t enjoy the way the therapist fixes me with her unblinking gaze. She seems to want to urge me to undertake a search and reconstruction of myself such as the one she herself is attempting. When I think of her ugly clothes and the quite stunning, almost deathly ugliness of the inside of her hou…