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You can’t write honestly while you’re whole. Some part of you needs to be ripped up, tuckered out, tarred and feathered by a remorseless epiphany — it is contrast that reveals truth, not reconciliation. You can write happily, yes: but only as, with your other hand, you render an outcast of depression. Love, yes, may write true: but only by renouncing any part of you resigned to lovelessness, or despairing of it, or fearing love’s mortality.

It is in this way that somewhere, somewhere sat at back of mind, our author-self plays voyeur. It leers – you feel it – it leers and waits and watches, fingernails clacking on the table, desperately eager for some part of us to die so that a higher part may write. It is permission. Autopsy. No man ever wrote more honestly than after leaning at a balcony, placing fingerguns to temple, and blasting away every part of him that hoped.