Sight

From the author: “I wanted to write something that was a semi-fictional, semi-essay-style book. I’d done all the research for the historical sections but what I didn’t have was any thread to bring them together—I didn’t have the fictional bit, basically. That came really late to the process. I was sitting in the café at the Wellcome Library, waiting for somebody who was coming to meet me, and I was suddenly like, ‘God, if the narrator was pregnant, then that ties it all up.’ And then after that—not as research, I should make clear—I had my first child. I was like, ‘Oh, I can write about this now.’ I wanted to write a book that was unashamedly female. It wasn’t about relating to anybody, it was just about a really specific experience and going through it, and not apologising for how complicated it might feel. Having children is something that sometimes it feels like you have to say that you definitely do want to do or you definitely don’t want to do. And then once you’ve made that decision, it’s either completely wonderful all the time or completely terrible all the time. And the fact that you might just feel as ambiguous about it as people do about everything else in the world—I really wanted to write that process. I studied philosophy, and I like to think about things, and I like to talk about my feelings interminably. So, I think that I put all of that in there and hoped that I wasn’t the only person in the world that thought about things that much.”