It’s mid-November and my memoir ME AFTER YOU is published, reviewed and gathering dust on bookshelves across the country.

I now find myself shuffling awkwardly on my cheap leatherette office chair doing anything but knuckle down to my next book. (I’m grappling with a structural issue which is so complex that I am regularly forced to abandon it in order to go out and spend money I haven’t got on items I don’t need.)

There is a distinct sense of deflation after finishing any piece of writing, especially one as gruelling and emotionally challenging as ME AFTER YOU. It has been part of my everyday life for so long, now that it is gone I am bereft. I look for it in bookshops, and find it, nestling in a mind-boggling miscellany of sections, from self-help to biography and beyond. I gaze upon it lovingly, sometimes plucking it from the shelf and stroking its beautiful, peaceful cover (the one we tussled over, my publisher and I, because it seemed so at odds with the chaos depicted within.)

Realigning and disciplining the writerly mind feels now to be a Sisyphean task, so I’m blogging about it in an attempt to clear the log-jam. And then I’m off to the shops.