“There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.”
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Both my mum and dad were great readers, and we would go every Saturday morning to the library, and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature, and all of us would come with an armful of books.
The day in 2004 when the radiologist told me I had invasive cancer, I walked down the hospital corridor looking for a phone to call my husband, and I could almost see the fear coming toward me like a big, black shadow.
My mother's family were full-on Irish Catholics - faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women's rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old.
I mean the beauty of being a writer is it's not like being a swimmer. When they were talking about our Olympic swimmers and they'd say, 'Oh she's so old, ' and she's all of 25 or something. So the beauty for a writer is that you can keep doing it right into your dotage, and I hope to be able to keep doing it as long as I can get away with it, yeah.