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Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.

The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.

I set out to write a screenplay but, since my early 20s, had dreamed of writing a novel.

It was failing part of my Ph.D. that led me into novel-writing. By then I was 29, had remarried and had a second baby. It struck me that I'd lost my path in life and I felt frustrated. That's when I started to write.

I began writing fiction when I started running out of material in my own life.

I don't write from dreams because I don't remember mine, but I had a fragment of an image left about twins, whose father was telling them how their lives were going to go for the next eight years. I wrote a scene about that, and then another and then another and then another, and after five months I had 732 pages.

I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

I have resolved to pick one novel and just read it over and over again for the rest of my life, because I cannot remember anything anymore.

At thirty-five, having spent over twenty years running varied businesses for my family, I decided to sit down and write my first novel. I had never written anything longer than a couple of pages till then and was foolishly attempting to write a hundred-thousand words.

My first book is really comparable to what I do now, where it's pretty surreal and strange at moments, but that being my first book - I wrote that when I was 22; it came out when I was 24 - and it was just really overwritten. I just didn't trust myself as a writer to say something once.