With Charles Woods, it was the first time I had ever seen tissue from a dead person used to save a human life. It piqued my curiosity.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I once did an event with Ian Rankin where he said he didn't really need to do much background research because his books are set in the present, and I just thought: 'You lucky, lucky beast!' because as a historical novelist, I live constantly on the edge of wondering whether tissues had been invented.
Not much shocked me. You know, I worked in a home for Alzheimer's patients and my dad used to be really into murders and stuff, so I saw dead bodies. It desensitised me to a lot of things.
This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving souls. All propagated with the best intentions.
In fact, death seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution. One can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic corpse.
I'll never forget the first time I saw someone who had died. It was my grandfather. And I knelt next to his coffin. And all I could do was eye level was look at his hands. They were enormous hands. And all I could think was, 'Those hands dug freedom for me.'
I had spent so much time studying literature at Stanford and the history of medicine at Cambridge in an attempt to better understand the particularities of death, only to come away feeling like they were still unknowable to me.
I like thinking about the fragility of the human flesh and our bodies - our decay and eventual death.
Research challenges the materialistic understanding of death, according to which biological death represents the final end of existence and of all conscious activity.
No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.
When I was at school studying biology, I wanted to be a medical researcher. I did work experience at St Mary's Hospital in London, and I begged them to let me see the post mortems. So the first time I saw a naked male was at 15, when I saw an 89 year old man who had died of a brain hemorrhage.