Host (Waterstones Podcast)

Well, yes, but it is a way of coping.

And people would have a different way of responding to trauma and bad things that happen in their life.

And yours is always to write.

Was it immediate with everything that you went through with Paul through his illness and when he passed away?

Yeah.

You mention Salman Rushdie in the book, a friend of you both.

And I spoke to him around the publication of Knife.

Yes.

he expressed that exact same need to write about what he had been through.

I suppose especially creatives would reach for whatever their means of expression was.

You mentioned that what you were mourning in the period after his death was Siri and Paul.

And that's a very important distinction, I think.

Could you say a little bit, I suppose, about what you mean by that?

See, the Germans always have the very specific word for everything.

There is a moment in the book when you're mentioning some photography and you come across some photographs of trees.

And one of these trees has been split in half by lightning.

One half has continued to grow and is in bloom and the other half is completely dead.

And you say, as a metaphor, maybe a little bit too on the nose.

I just wondered whether you still felt the same way about that metaphor.

You mentioned as well in the writing of the book that obviously what you were trying to do through the writing was to bring him back in some way, shape or form.