Mythology Is Much Better Stuff Than History.

The Photograph Is Concerned With The Power That The Past Has To Interfere With The Present: The Time Bomb In The Cupboard.

The Place Didn't Look The Same But It Felt The Same; Sensations Clutched And Transformed Me. I Stood Outside Some Concrete And Plate-glass Tower-block, Picked A Handful Of Eucalyptus Leaves From A Branch, Crushed Them In My Hand, Smelt, And Tears Came To My Eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, On A Pavement Awash With Packaged American Matrons, Crying Not In Grief But In Wonder That Nothing Is Ever Lost, That Everything Can Be Retrieved, That A Lifetime Is Not Linear But Instant. That, Inside The Head, Everything Happens At Once.

The Present Hardly Exists, After All-it Becomes The Past Even As It Happens. A Tricky Medium, Time - And Central To The Concerns Of Fiction.

I Didn't Want It To Be A Book That Made Pronouncements.

The Past Is Our Ultimate Privacy; We Pile It Up, Year By Year, Decade By Decade, It Stows Itself Away, With Its Perverse Random Recall System.