For the first year. I was full of fear, full of horror. Every morning you wake up, and it’s like a bereavement—you go through it all over again. You think: Oh my god. This is my life, and it isn’t the life I was meant to have. This isn’t what I was expecting.

I didn’t miss the journalism as such. I didn’t miss the research, or the interviews. But I missed the writing. Not writing felt like a huge loss: physical, like an ache. So after a few months I fumbled my way into a local creative writing class, a little lunchtime workshop that fitted into my children’s school day. I was so scared that first session. I guess I was worried I’d be found out, that it would be embarrassing. It was, to begin with. I felt like such a fraud, such an idiot. The whole sensation of sitting around making things up felt pretty preposterous. And then, almost immediately, it felt brilliant. Things opened up for me emotionally, somehow. Some joy came back into my life. I certainly wasn’t thinking about a bigger project or a new career—just about the pure fun of sitting in that room and having the freedom to scribble a page or so, once a week. It felt good.

A few months after starting the course, I had an idea that I couldn’t argue with. It was such a complete idea, set in a world I knew well: set in the world of newspapers, in my corner of London. There weren’t any excuses for not starting it immediately. I thought—well, why not just give it a shot?

So I started writing. Just secretly at first. I wrote without really stopping to think about it—I think if I had stopped to think what I was doing, I would have lost my nerve. Writing fiction, to me, feels a bit like the moment in those Roadrunner cartoons where he runs off the cliff and the bridge builds itself underneath his feet. You see the planks of wood flying up, supporting him, but if he stops—that’s it, he plummets. If he keeps going, though, he’ll reach the other side.

And so I wrote myself a purpose. I wrote myself back into the world. To find this fantastic new freedom—which is always how the writing feels to me: it’s a tremendous source of fun—has been an amazing surprise, one of the great true surprises of my adult life.

I certainly didn’t think about it at the time but looking back over Alys, Always and Her, I can see that these stories must serve some therapeutic purpose. In my books I get to create anxiety on my own terms. I can moderate fear and pass it on to other people. This creative, oddly communal form of anxiety feels very different from the kind I have in the back of my mind always—the fear about what will happen to my sight. There is something delicious—that’s the only word I can use to describe it—about recreating apprehension on the page.

In my everyday life I have no control, really: who does? But on paper, I hold all the cards. Fiction provides you with a way to shape a world, to exert the kind of power and agency our real lives so often lack. I seem to be drawn to characters— duplicitous or manipulative characters—who specialize in this sort of thing. Frances in Alys, Always and Nina in Her are both extremely skilled at shaping the world around them, and getting what they want from it. Nina’s whole life is about that control.