Maggie O’Farrell

So obviously, when you're a teenager, the last thing you want is something to mark you out.

So I just said to my mom and dad, I don't want anyone to know.

I want to, you know, just be I put that behind me.

And I think I thought as a teenager, I could do that, that you can't put it behind you.

Almost you could wishfully undo it somehow.

You could wishfully edit it out of your life.

But of course, you can't do that.

I'd never really talked about it before.

I mean, I'd written about it in fiction.

I wrote about that illness.

I gave it to someone else.

I gave it to a character and someone else in one of my books called The Distance Between Us, which I suppose was a kind of start into thinking about it or analysing it

But I think I realized that it isn't something, you know, as you get older, I think you realize that you can't really leave these selves behind, that they all travel along inside you like those Matryoshka dolls.

But yeah, I think your attitude to these things changes all the time, doesn't it?

The way wherever you are on the continuum of your life, you look at things differently.

I do.

I feel like somebody who's incredibly fortunate that I did almost die when I was a child, but I didn't.

And I was told that I wouldn't be able to walk again, but I did.

And that really feels as though I've won a thousand lotteries for both those reasons.

So I still feel like that.