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4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016
Copyright © Miranda Sawyer 2016
Miranda Sawyer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780007521081
Ebook Edition © ISBN: 9780007509157
Version: 2017-04-11
For S, P and F
‘Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything’
Humboldt’s Gift, Saul Bellow
‘You’re going to have to fucking swallow this whole fucking life and let it grow inside you like a parasite’
Malcolm Tucker, The Thick of It
Contents
The start is always quiet. Even when the event is catastrophic, when it’s sudden and violent and crashes in, a meteor blazing from the sky to change everything you know – even then, what people say is: ‘It happened out of the blue. Everything was normal. Nothing seemed any different. It was a complete shock.’
When what is happening is gradual, when it seeps under the door, like water or smoke, then the start is even quieter. It’s silent. You don’t notice it at all.
Middle age is a time of settled status, when your achievements,
