Hello – I have attached a draft of the essay with notes below. It’s reading really nicely the way it is, but I wonder what you think about the idea of switching the two middle sections? So the biographical part would come later on. Have a look and see how you feel. Did JP ever get back to you with his notes? I suspect he would be much more useful than I am!

I have so completely lost any sense of linear time that I was lying in bed last night thinking: it must be nearly a year now since the first time Eileen and Simon were here. And only very gradually – as I became conscious that I was lying under our big warm duvet rather than the light summer blanket – did I remember that it is now almost December, eighteen months since that first visit last summer. Eighteen months!! Is this how it’s going to be for the rest of our lives? Time dissolving into thick dark fog, things that happened last week seeming years ago, and things that happened last year feeling like yesterday. I hope this is a side effect of lockdown and not simply a consequence of growing older. Speaking of which: happy belated. I did put a gift in the post on time, but have no idea when or whether it will arrive …

No news on our end. Felix is as well as can be expected. He continues to experience periodic episodes of despair about the pandemic, and to hint darkly that if the situation continues much longer he won’t be responsible for his actions. But he usually cheers up again afterwards. In the meantime he has been doing the grocery shopping for several elderly people in the village, which gives him lots of opportunities to complain about elderly people, and he also spends quite a bit of time down at the community garden, making compost, complaining about making compost, and so on. For my part, the difference between lockdown and normal life is (depressingly?) minimal. Eighty to ninety per cent of my days are the same as they would be anyway – working from home, reading, avoiding social gatherings. But then it turns out that even a tiny amount of socialising is very different from none – I mean, one dinner party every two weeks is categorically different from no parties at all. And of course I continue to miss you passionately, and your boyfriend too. Seeing him on the news the other night was the thrill of our lives, by the way. Felix is convinced the dog recognised him, because she barked at the screen, but between you and me she barks at the television all the time.

I don’t know if you’ve been following any of this, but about a month ago I was doing an interview over email and the journalist asked me what my partner thought of my books. Unthinkingly, I wrote back that he had never read them. So of course this became the headline of the interview – ‘Alice Kelleher: my boyfriend has never read my books’ – and afterwards Felix saw a popular tweet saying something like, ‘this is tragic … she deserves better’. He showed me the tweet on the screen of his phone one evening without saying anything, and when I asked him what he thought about it, he just shrugged. At first I thought: a perfect example of our shallow self-congratulatory ‘book culture’, in which non-readers are shunned as morally inferior, and the more books you read, the better you are than everyone else. But then I thought: no, what we really have here is an example of a presumably normal and sane person whose thinking has been deranged by the concept of celebrity. An example of someone who genuinely believes that because she has seen my photograph and read my novels, she knows me personally – and in fact knows better than I do what is best for my life. And it’s normal! It’s normal for her not only to think these bizarre thoughts privately, but to express them in public, and receive positive feedback and attention as a result. She has no idea that she is, in this small limited respect, quite literally insane, because everyone around her is also insane in exactly the same way. They really cannot tell the difference between someone they have heard of, and someone they personally know. And they believe that the feelings they have about this person they imagine me to be – intimacy, resentment, hatred, pity – are as real as the feelings they have about their own friends. It makes me wonder whether celebrity culture has sort of metastasised to fill the emptiness left by religion. Like a malignant growth where the sacred used to be.

In other news that isn’t news, the saga of my poor health continues as before. With one thing and another I am in pain almost every day now. In my better moods, I tell myself this is just a consequence of all the accumulated stress and exhaustion of the last few years, and it will resolve itself with time and patience. And in my worse moods I think: this is it, this is my life. I have been reading a lot about ‘stress’ in the medical literature. Everyone seems to agree it is about as bad for your health as smoking, and beyond a certain point practically guarantees a major adverse health outcome. And yet the only recommended treatment for stress is not to experience it in the first place. It’s not like anxiety or depression, where you can go to your doctor and get treated and hopefully experience some degree of symptomatic improvement. It’s like taking illegal drugs – you’re just not supposed to do it, and if you do, you should try to do it less. There is no available medication to treat the problem, and no therapeutic regime backed by any real evidence. Just don’t get stressed! It’s very important, or you could make yourself really sick!! Anyway, from an aetiological standpoint I feel like I’ve been locked in a smoke-filled room with thousands of people shouting at me incomprehensibly day and night for the last several years. And I don’t know when it will end, or how long it will take me to feel better afterwards, or if I ever will. On one hand, I know the human body can be incredibly resilient. On the other, my sturdy peasant ancestors did little to prepare me for a career as a widely despised celebrity novelist. What do you think? Gradual return to a state of fair-to-moderate physical health? Or gradual acceptance of chronic poor health, perhaps presenting new opportunities for spiritual growth?

Speaking of which: when Felix saw I was writing you an email, he said, ‘You should tell her you’re Catholic now.’ This is because he recently asked me if I believed in God, and I said I didn’t know. He went around shaking his head all day after that, and then told me that if I go off and join a convent, I shouldn’t expect any visits from him. Needless to say, I am not going to join a convent, nor am I even Catholic, as far as I know. I only feel, rightly or wrongly, that there is something underneath everything. When one person kills or harms another person, then there is ‘something’ – isn’t there? Not simply atoms flying around in various configurations through empty space. I don’t know how to explain myself, really. But I feel that it does matter – not to hurt other people, even in one’s own self-interest. Felix of course agrees with this sentiment as far as it goes, and he points out (quite reasonably) that nobody goes around committing mass murders just because they don’t believe in God. But increasingly I think it’s because, in one way or another, they do believe in God – they believe in the God that is the deep buried principle of goodness and love underneath everything. Goodness regardless of reward, regardless of our own desires, regardless of whether anyone is watching or anyone will know. If that’s God, then Felix says fine, it’s just a word, it means nothing. And of course it doesn’t mean heaven and angels and the resurrection of Christ – but maybe those things can help in some way to put us in touch with what it does mean. That most of our attempts throughout human history to describe the difference between right and wrong have been feeble and cruel and unjust, but that the difference still remains – beyond ourselves, beyond each specific culture, beyond every individual person who has ever lived or died. And we spend our lives trying to know that difference and to live by it, trying to love other people instead of hating them, and there is nothing else that matters on the earth.

The book was proceeding by leaps before, but has now slowed to a kind of intermittent trickle. Naturally my sanguine temperament has prevented me from reading anything ominous into this turn of events. Haha! But really, I am trying not to go down that rabbit hole again this time – worrying that my brain has stopped working and that I’ll never write another novel. One day I’ll be right, and then I can’t imagine I’ll be glad that I spent so much time feeling anxious in advance. I know I am lucky in so many ways. And when I forget that, I just remind myself of the fact that Felix is alive, and you are, and Simon is, and then I feel wonderfully and almost frighteningly lucky, and I pray that nothing bad will ever happen to any of you. Now write back and tell me how you are.