Cassie McCullagh

Her family didn't have that way of looking outwards into the world.

And there's something both terribly moving about hearing about this friendship and family, but tragic that it referred back to her friend's father like that.

Some of it is, well, because it begins with her saying, I go to see my friend and I can't get her, you know, I need to get her to leave the house.

So some of it is there's a sort of spine.

Yes, and that is the last months, weeks, days of her life as well.

And then in between, we're going in and out of their history together.

I mean, how would you describe that fragmented but somehow very carefully made structure, Hannah?

And they do it by talking, they often talk about reading and they talk about the act of writing.

But what they don't do is read each other's work and analyse it.

So there's something very active about their reading and writing selves without then having to confront what the other is doing in a way.

And there's something quite careful there about the boundaries that

that they're making with each other, even though there are other things that they're doing in parallel.

So they had both worked in universities, but they did it in different ways.

I mean, Deborah just kept on working, whereas...

the narrator, Deborah, and her friend kept moving in and out of the academy and was always haunted by a fear of failure, anxieties about money, fear about being an older woman in poverty.

So the way that they managed their working lives and their anxieties about that were fundamentally different, but they kept talking about all of that.

over and over again.

And managing somebody else's depression and anxiety, that is a really tough thing to read about, Hannah, isn't it?

It's also really worth listening to an interview on the book show on ABC Radio National with Claire Nicholls.

It's a very good discussion of the making of this book.