Essays & Notes

The countryside teaches patience to those willing to sit with its silences long enough to hear what it is actually saying. I spent three summers in a village of two hundred souls before I wrote a single line that felt true to it.

Before email, before text, a letter demanded something of you: the discipline of beginning, the commitment of the envelope sealed. There was no unsend. This irreversibility was part of the form's power.

The books we return to are not the same books we left. We have changed; and in the interval, so — mysteriously — have they. Fitzgerald grows more severe, more clear, with each decade you bring to her.

Every map lies a little. The river I grew up beside has moved twice since they surveyed it, and the maps have never quite caught up. There is something instructive in that.

I have thrown away more first sentences than I have kept novels. There is a particular kind of vanity in believing the first line must announce everything the book intends to be.

A slow book asks you to change your pace, not the other way around. There are novels that refuse to be skimmed, and I have come to think this refusal is itself a kind of generosity.

Prizes are a flawed but necessary fiction we tell ourselves about merit. This year's longlist is, as ever, an argument disguised as a list.

I have been keeping a record of one hedgerow for twelve months now — not because it is remarkable, but because I suspected it might teach me something about attention.

Every draft is a version of yourself you are allowed to disagree with later. I have learned to think of revision less as correction and more as a kind of mercy.