Philip Roth once said that real life was so extraordinary that no fiction could compete with it – if a writer invented such outlandish plots no one would believe it. Thinking about this, it strikes me that among the chaos of the life lived; a fictional world is eminently more controllable, more safe. I think I have always written in order to explore what motivates people to do the things they do – in particular the small cruelties, the manipulations and then the self-justification that follows.
I was never much of a reader as a child, so I jumped straight from the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson to Flannery O’Connor, George Orwell, Edna O’Brien and Sylvia Plath. The choices were arbitrary – based on chance and my immediate reaction to the first pages more than anything.
Falling under the long shadow of Plath the dark dreamer, good scholar and…
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