The novelist Nicholas Delbanco has remarked that by the age of four one has experienced nearly everything one needs as a writer of fiction: love, pain, loss, boredom, rage, guilt, fear of death. The writer’s business is to make up convincing human beings and create for them basic situations and actions by means of which they come to know themselves

There wasn’t much laughter in my childhood. Misery is so comfortable that I sometimes create a crisis where there is none.

Being emotionally neglected by a distracted parent can instil a lasting sense of worthlessness which no amount of later attention or fame can easily contradict. Fear of a volatile parent’s temper can mold a whole personality in the direction of meekness and compliance. The