Write what you don’t know
By the time I wrote Cadenza, I had realised that the advice to ‘write what you know’ was lousy advice for a fiction writer. Part of my artistic agenda was to do something like the opposite. Writing what you know is a good way to stop your imagination before it even gets started. It’s also...
Time to say goodbye
Most people live in compromise. For me, this has never been an option. Not that I ever wanted some insipid “normal” existence, but people have said, and I suppose will always say, she did this or that “because of the accident” or “in spite of the accident.” These statements amount to the same thing: they’re...
Our Lady in peril
Of the night of the fire I remember a kaleidoscope of images, a collision of emotions, in quick succession. Through my kitchen window seeing bright-yellow plumes of smoke coiling into the sky, then rushing down the stairs onto quai de la Tournelle, standing right opposite Notre-Dame’s south rose window, the red and orange tongues of...
The cow who wanted to be a dog
It was the sugarcane harvest and the fields were burning. You could see flames all the way from here to the mountains. Ash floated around all day, sticking to your skin, your moustache, your eyelashes. We were all black with it. On the fifth day it rained. It doesn’t rain in December, but that year...
