In my new novel, A Book of Days, a husband is dying slowly. While I was writing it, my own husband died suddenly, with no warning. He died in his sleep, I was told. His children and I hope that …
Confessions of a Country Parson
I spent the first week of January in the parish of Weston Longville, Norfolk, in the company of the Revd James Woodforde. The year is 1776, or 1784, or 1801. No matter. The year is not important, because each year …
The lies of trauma merchants
My colleagues and I filed into the vice president’s office at the publishing house where I worked, crowding around a television that was turned to ABC. The year was 2005. The mood was giddy, as if we were about to …
The grubby truth about mental health memoirs
I don’t quite know what to do with mental illness memoirs. I’m naturally interested in their subject, as I suffer from bipolar disorder myself. And they fulfil an important social function: despite the rise of innumerable online voices yelling about …
How sensitivity readers corrupt literature
What did the sensitivity readers say? And did I care? Of all the aspects of the recent attempt to cancel my work, the one that seems to fascinate most people is the moment when my publishers sent my Orwell Prize-winning …