Andrew O'Hagan

That tells us something.

There's always many sides, many facets to any particular story.

And I suppose as readers, the excitement is trying to look at the thing from every angle, trying to look around it.

I met Caroline Cassidy quite late in her life, in the last year of her life.

She was living in a trailer park near Reading in England by that point, on her own.

I went to see her and she said, you know, they were just boys.

You know, they had their day in the sun.

And the way she said it in so much of the twilight of her own life made me realise that there's a kind of forgiveness in it too, that some people's freedom is other people's repression.

But in the end, if you're able to imagine a freedom for yourself, then there's a sort of deliverance from it.

And that's certainly the message she gave out.

Well, you know, I share that feeling exactly with you.

Sometimes you want to write a book.

As a novelist, you want to write a book that is like the books that broke your heart when you were young.

And this was that book for me.

The responses to this one have been overwhelming to me.

People take it really personally, this book.

Perhaps because we all have a part of our lives we can look towards in that way.

It is gone forever, but never really gone.

Because nostalgia isn't really a thing.

It doesn't exist because the past is never really the past.