Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I had to live out some of my mother's unlived life. She was a flamboyant depressive who kept a revolver in the duster drawer and the bullets in a tin of Pledge. She was alive when my first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published in 1985. #2 I was trying to get away from the received idea that women always write about experience while men write about broad and bold experiments with form. I was angry that writers were sex-crazed bohemians who broke the rules. #3 I wrote the cover story of myself being a misfit, so that I could escape the pain of being alone. I spent most of my school years sitting on the railings outside the school gates, so I could be seen and not liked. #4 I had no idea how to love or trust another person, and I thought that love was loss. I believed that the world was unfair and out of control, and that we can only control what we can see.