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I wrote my first story when I was six or seven.

The first story I can remember writing, that I truly set down on paper, was a Christmas story that I wrote when I was ten years old.

In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.

The first story I finished was when I was six years old.

I wrote my earliest piece for The Sunday Times about being a young wife.

You know, I'm trying to sometimes sit down and write some stories about my childhood and maybe one when I'm an old lady put them out like a book.

I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.

I never like to put myself in the stories; in 'Lost in the City,' there are fourteen stories, and there's only one, 'The First Day,' about a little girl going to school, that has anything to do with me.

Of all the love stories ever published, I have - realistically - read very few.