I tend to think of writing as a personality trait, rather than any kind of inherent skill. I think you have to have always been an observer. On top of that, you tend to feel a responsibility to translate and report on your observations. This is why most people who are writers have sort of always known that they’re writers.

Heartsease is my second book, and it was slow to write. My first book, A Treacherous Country, took very little time. I wrote it for a deadline, and I wrote it for escapism: I had a new baby and I was quite astonished by that experience and the experience of new motherhood, which was sedentary and emotional, but also very much centred on the body. I wanted something that was away from breastfeeding and tiredness and bleeding and nappies (and sitting on the couch with the baby in my arms and watching the leeks I’d planted while pregnant in a bid to be some kind of tiresome Earth Mother grow and grow and then flower and go to seed and then start to sag and rot). In other words, I wanted something centred on the mind. So I wrote a book. At first I tried for something personal, but it was too much. Too close to the bone. Instead, I wrote about a person who was the opposite of me and in the opposite of my situation. Heartsease, on the other hand, is much closer to me, and I think that’s why it took me so long to write. It came from experience, and experiences must be taken in real time. It’s not a memoir; it’s certainly fiction. But its themes are personal.

I first started something like Heartsease maybe fifteen years ago. It was called Tensions Have Arisen, which then changed to Vagrant Bodies, and then back to Tensions Have Arisen again. It was about a young woman called Ellen Llewellyn who was already dysfunctional and then had a terrible experience that made her even more dysfunctional. The experience she had was something I too had experienced, and her dysfunction was an echo of my own. But these were things I really needed distance from in order to reflect on. I needed to live away from them, to grow away from them, to let them heal over and form wounds I could map. Time passed, and I travelled, and got a degree, wandered around taking jobs here and there, had children, stopped my roaming, and even built something you could potentially, generously, call a career. I read a lot more books. I published my own first book. And then I turned to my second, and I put my fingers to the keyboard, and I realised that the time had come: I had grown enough to write about a sadness that had once been my own, but in a way that was not about myself.

Heartsease is about love, memory, and grief. It’s also a ghost story. It’s told from the perspectives of two sisters, Charlotte and Ellen, following two separate timelines: Ellen’s timeline follows her very last night on earth, and Charlotte’s picks up the next morning. I remember not quite knowing how to fit these timelines together at first. It seemed obvious, on the face of it, to tell them one after another. Ellen’s story of her last night and then her death (this is not a spoiler, I promise), and then Charlotte’s story of grief, beginning the next morning. But that felt too artificial, too neat. It didn’t feel like an honest representation of how we experience these things. We don’t live only here in the present. We live partly here, but I think we live just as much in the past, and then a little in the future, too. So instead of presenting the story linearly, I interleaved the timelines, and brought each narrative in and out of memory on top of that, too. I don’t know how to really capture an authentic experience, but this approach feels like it has brought me a little closer than if I wrote it more straightforwardly.

I do have two small children, and a part-time day job, and a part-time second job, and then also technically another job, and a life with all the usual accompaniments. I sometimes get asked how I find time to write. The answer is in two parts. The first is that writing is energising for me, and so I make time for it in the same way others might make time for an exercise class, or visiting the farmer’s market, or bushwalking, or the study of a language, or movie nights, or dancing, or whatever the wonderful thing that replenishes them is. I’m busy, and tired, but that’s nothing special. Plenty of people are busier and more tired than I am. The key, I think, is in performing a kind of life triage, in which you assess all the things you have to do, and decide which ones are most urgent, and do those first. For me, writing is high-middle. It’s not as urgent as, say, feeding my children, or lying awake worrying about all the stupid things I’ve ever said, but more urgent than, for example, weeding the garden or washing the floors.

The second part is that if writing is part of my personality, and if this particular form of creative expression matters to me, then I believe that everything I do and experience is in service of it. There are times when I’m not writing, either because of circumstance, or because I don’t know what to write. These fallow periods are as intrinsic to the process as the actual putting of words on the page. ‘Writing’ is almost the wrong word for it. Such a large part of it is not writing at all, but more a kind of gathering.

It’s funny to finish the editing process and call a book finished. It’s never finished. I could probably write the whole novel again and write it differently, now. All I can do, though, is bring it to a point where I feel it represents what I’m trying to say, and then send it out into the world, and hope that I’ve articulated myself well enough that other people see what I mean.

I saw my mother for a long time after she died. I would see her out windows, or in the corner of my eye. Always in the periphery, always a dim blur, but unmistakably my mother, the herness skating through every line and flicker.