As regular attendees at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings will be aware, There is some necessity at gatherings of this kind to qualify oneself, and I would like to qualify myself for this meeting of Amos Anonymous as well.

We come from a literary culture crucially influenced by Roland Barthes' notion of the death of the author.

This figuration gives expression to an understanding consolidated by the linguistic turn in philosophy in the late 19th century.

that the symbolic system represented by human language determines the entire ontic character of every human psyche and so forecloses on the idea that the writer can, in any simple sense, represent a reality independent of language.

Rather, the writer is a temporalized being whose recursive activity of inscription defines both writer and activity always in media res.

Be that as it may, the personal remains key to human life.

What school did you first go to?

I went to a lit- what we would call in those days a dames school run by Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Davis.

And just to give you a portrait of how brilliant my mother was, these two old dames, who were perfectly all right, old ladies who ran a school for about 80 kids in Golders Green, and we all had little uniforms, Golders Hill School.

At the end, when you left, age seven, you were meant to go up to them both, they were standing on the steps, the house is still there, and you would shake their hands and say, "Thank you very much, Miss Davis," and, "Thank you very much, Miss Fitzgerald." I said to Mum, seven, I said, "I hate Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Davis.

They're, they, they are authority figures I have no confidence in." [laughs] So Mum said, "Fine.

I'll have the car waiting at the bottom of the steps, gunning the engine.

I'll have my foot on the accelerator.

Yeah.

[laughs]

Well, I mean, I'm not the Prince of Serendip, but the advantage of a, [laughs] a long writer's life is that you have a lot of material kicking around.

In this instance, the first chapter, which is entitled The Minor Character, I published in a collection of my shorter fiction called The Undivided Self, which was only published in the US.

So it's never been published in the UK as a standalone story.

I like the story a lot, and I turned it into a, a short film for television, uh, around the time it was written, but I wasn't satisfied with that either.

And what had always troubled me, the story ostensibly is about a colloquy of friends, a little friend group.

And what inspired me to write it was the way not just that people deny death, but the way that there are certain people within a social setting, if you are pitilessly honest with yourself, whose death will be quite unremarkable to you.

Uh, so, so what is the theory?