What’s your new book Welcome to Your New Life about?
It’s a book addressed to my first child, mapping the months of his gestation and the first two years of his life, for which he retains no memory of his own. I hoped to write a small tale and a large one at the same time: nothing and everything happens.
What was the most surprising thing for you about having your first child?
It has been a non-ending sequence of surprises. But perhaps the greatest surprise was how completely my baby was his own person, from the very first moment. I had previously imagined parenthood as a version of self-love, fuelled by narcissism. The surprise was that it is about loving somebody completely other, at a level that transcends self-regard.
Welcome to Your New Life is your second memoir. Did you always plan to write another memoir after Piano Lessons?
Absolutely not. After writing Piano Lessons and then talking about it exhaustively, I was thoroughly bored by ‘Anna Goldsworthy’, and had grander projects in mind. But over the course of my pregnancy and the early months of my son’s life, I jotted things in my notebook, until I realised I was accidentally writing another book.
