Thinking about friendship now, I think about the ways in which we are able to do things with others that we could never do on our own. The way that friends drag unknown parts out of our bodies, allowing us to be braver than we can feel by ourselves.

As someone who writes as well as edits, I’ve been on both sides of the door. As an editor, I have sent out thousands of “rejections”: template rejections, encouraging rejections, rejections with apologies for the delayed reply, rejections with a little feedback, rejections with a lot of feedback, and rejections with explicit requests to send me further drafts. So far, I have received only one death threat.

The last few years, writing fiction has scared the shit out of me. I have been afraid to just sit down and write a story. Instead, I’ve taken refuge in what I thought was editing, but was actually a fearful kind of second-guessing and compulsive ruminating. Unchecked, ‘editing’ became for me a chronic defence-mechanism, a knotted means of avoiding the essential creative encounter with Not-Knowing.

In my mid-twenties I spent three years writing a novel – and the novel was shit. I had always considered myself as someone with good taste, and when I finished the book I could see that it wasn’t living up to my refined standards. In fact, it wasn’t living at all.