Six Sentences

1. When Michel Faber was writing his most recent, and last he says, novel, his wife was dying.

2. Writing is a solitary career: you have be alone and uninterrupted to write, he told the interviewer from Guardian Books.

3. You can't write a novel and yet be physically with the woman you love, even while she is incrementally dying in the next room and you know your days together are limited.

4. But she wanted him to keep on and to finish writing the novel, because she loved him too and knew that he needed to finish writing it, perhaps because it was a novel about love and separation, coincidentally.

5. She offered him a compromise: That he write six sentences day.

6. This he did, and he finished the novel before she died.

The Book Of Strange New Things

(paraphrased by) E@L


[I couldn't quite place his accent - is it Australian? I had always thought him Scottish, perhaps because of Under The Skin. Turns out he was born in Holland, went to school in Australia, where no doubt that soft, ESL, accent was developed, and now he lives in Scotland. All these countries claim him as their own.]