A heart bypass in 2019 followed by a Covid infection left the novelist unable to read a book, let alone write one. Five years on, he recalls the steps that have helped him back on the right path
It has been a peculiar and exasperating five years. I’m a writer. I do other things but writing feels like my main reason for being on the planet. Thanks to a triple heart bypass, some underperforming psychiatric medication and long Covid, however, I’ve been unable to write for most of that period. Much of the time it’s been impossible to read as well.
The heart bypass happened in early 2019, three weeks before my last novel, The Porpoise, was published. Consequently, I had to do interviews either reclining on the sofa at home like a poodle-less Barbara Cartland or down the line from Radio Oxford which, after you’ve had your chest opened with a circular saw and have trouble remembering your own phone number, feels like driving way too fast through thick fog.
