… and the story as it plays out in my mind is that I became a writer when I started to realise that I wasn't loved and that maybe I never would be. I was nineteen and epic stories were snaking out of me because I felt badly treated, or I was newly aware that I'd colluded in my self-annihilation and the love I had sought up until then was a lie. I became a writer when I learned that I was a person and not just a figure inside another person's libidinal imagination - I am still not entirely that, though, a person; still part of my brain is lobotomised by the fantasy of glory and worthiness in libidinal abjection and I have to somehow live with that.