Harrison Ford

So I didn't have much to go on.

And I am aware of the difficulties of doing this as a male writer.

And it seems to me that the way to cross the distance between me and someone like Iris is to really commit to her viewpoint.

So the book never

ever lets you know what she looks like, for example.

So she is never the object of the book's attention.

She is always the subject, the person who is looking at the world and liking what she sees.

There are a number of detailed descriptions of the male bodies she looks at, but none of her own.

And I wanted somebody who genuinely had the freedom to be unlikable at times and complicated and genuinely self-centered, not a secretly kind-hearted person merely posing as assertive, but somebody who was determined enough to get what they want that they could be quite manipulative.

I wouldn't put it quite like that.

They tried their damnedest.

They were very aware of exactly the danger of me being benignly neglected.

But it had the perverse consequence that I think I spent my childhood feeling I needed to reassure them that I was fine, which was emotionally laborious in itself.

So I was very glad to head off into books as a series of doors out from emotional intensity.

Yeah.

And remained so for some time, although the existence of the iPhone has kind of sabotaged that deep immersion now.

I was the kind of reader as a child where people had to shout in my ears when it was mealtime to get me to come back and pay attention to the soundtrack of the real world.

Very deep immersion with something, I think, a bit driven about it.

I'm not sorry that I've lost the capacity to go that far away, though I wish I could swim in whole reservoirs of novels rather than coming up to check my email every half an hour or so.

Yes, I did, is the short answer.