Novels Without Female Characters Were A Lifeless

Had It Taken Her This Long To Discover That She Lacked Some Simple Mental Trick That Everyone Else Had, A Mechanism So Ordinary That No One Ever Mentioned It, An Immediate Sensual Connection To People And Events, And To Her Own Needs And Desires? All These Years She Had Lived In Isolation Within Herself And, Strangely, From Herself, Never Wanting Or Daring To Look Back.

But How To Do Feelings? All Very Well To Write "she Felt Sad", Or Describe What A Sad Person Might Do, But What Of Sadness Itself, How Was That Put Across So It Could Be Felt In All Its Lowering Immediacy? Even Harder Was The Threat, Or The Confusion Of Feeling Contradictory Things.

It's Good To Get Your Hands Dirty A Bit And To Test How You See Things At A Given Point. And It's Very Pleasing After Writing Something Like 'atonement' Or 'on Chesil Beach,' Which Are Historical, To Get Involved In Some Plausible Re-enactment Of The Here And Now.

Writers Are Said To Have Superstitions And Little Rituals. Readers Have Them Too.

London In The '70s Was A Pretty Catastrophic Dump, I Can Tell You. We Had Every Kind Of Industrial Trouble; We Had Severe Energy Problems; We Were Under Constant Terrorist Attack From Irish Terrorist Groups Who Had Started A Bombing Campaign In English Cities; Politics Were Fantastically Polarized Between Left And Right.