Kate Evans

and he lives in Brisbane.

And of course, there are all sorts of practical things that he has to take into account, which is part of what this letter is about.

Where do you live?

How do you get there?

What happens if you get lost?

Who are you?

What's your name?

And I spoke to Hugh Brakey and I asked him about the role of that letter and what it might mean to have to imagine both your past and future selves as different people.

And this is how he responded.

We can get through this together.

Now, Cassie, when I started reading this book, I started to really pay attention to the uses of plurals and singulars and this character who sometimes talks about I and sometimes talks about we and sometimes talks about you because he's this sort of divided self because he doesn't know who he was before, except for the clues he's got in this letter.

Which is sort of interesting because sometimes I think about versions of myself in the past and almost can't recognise her.

Like, why did she do that and what was she thinking?

Have you seen a psychiatrist about that, Kate?

So it's a sort of, it's an interesting thing to do to make that explicit, even though it's this huge suspension of disbelief.

Yeah, do you think so?

Yeah, okay.

So you went for it.

So I figured this was a novel where I just had to suspend disbelief mightily and imagine how you would cope if you'd forgotten everything.

So Alison, what were the sort of practical things that he was able to do or that he had to do, apart from the letter to himself, to actually get through the day?