Susan Johnson

It puts back all the kind of grief and the

All her intelligence is brought to bear in these novels, which are really the story of, as you said, Mireille, the death of a person, firstly, the death of a mother, the death of a wife, firstly, and then the death of a writer.

Because out of that creative death that she talks about, I think she's first talking about the death of the self.

That's why these books are so profound.

I think for me it's about humanity.

She's got a great deal of compassion in this book, I think, that hasn't sort of been evident before.

It's sort of like, as you say, Mireille, the sort of sorrows of life and being alive.

The depths of feeling in these books I think are really profound.

And I think before I found her work a bit too stylised.

And while we know that...

No one speaks of their life in such beautiful and direct and perfect stories.

And we know that that's obviously, you know, a device that the world, the real world is not like that.

But yet somehow every story that she's told has just this great beauty and depth about it.

It's very strange and new what she's doing, I think.

And so it's kind of quite hard to explain to people who haven't read it.

Isn't that wonderful?

It's just breathtakingly wonderful.

I mean, I just think she's, even on a sentence-by-sentence level, her writing is just so clear and beautiful.

I don't know how she does it, really.

Oh, no, no.