My dining room, this afternoon

And Louise Bourgeois is back, again.

There are interviews. There has been a party. A missed train. Meetings. Many late nights. There has been sitting on my dining room floor because I have been unable to find a new table that’s both practical and desirable. I am now sitting on my dining room floor. I stare at a Louise Bourgeois painting. This painting is one of three, not strictly a triptych although they sit well together, and were only painted two years apart. I suspect the plates are poor reproductions although the book was expensive. Bought at the Tate on the first day of the year. The last four new year’s days spent there. Alexander likes tradition and although normally he despises the tube, the Northern Line in particular, he particularly likes to stress this is what happens every first of January. Unlikely to happen this year, wonder fleetingly if he will mind doing it on the second, or in February or if in fact we could break with tradition entirely and go to the beach.

I would like to see these images in real life. I would like to feel how they would make me feel, more specifically, I would like to know how making them made Louise Bourgeois feel. In each, a woman takes the form of a house, and in doing so her body becomes architecture only, for a specific purpose. Bourgeois paints these and then after suffers a decade long hiatus during which she doesn’t exhibit. She writes compulsively during this time. Her written work has been described as a significant contribution to psychoanalysis. Much of this repository sits in an archive, little of it is available for public view. I think often of rescuing it. Think of the violence this might inflict on her. Read instead Eva Hesse’s diaries. Bourgeois says of this woman house figure - rendered unhomely as she becomes house only, in essence uncanny - that she runs away as soon as she is seen. I paraphrase here. I am too tired to check the specifics of the quote. This makes this bad writing. I am both an unreliable and a tired narrator. But the essence is there; the figure runs, although she cannot run, she must remain as blind to the fact she is a house as she must to the fact the house around her is on fire. There are facts we must remain blind to if we are to remain of the home. This woman, it is possible to infer, reveals too much of Bourgeois, more than perhaps she felt comfortable. There is the feeling, recently, that I am on the edge of being revealed. I did not always want to write a memoir, I have for many decades wanted to write a novel. This imminent revelation is not a comfortable place. Time has taken on a peculiar mercurial quality. It surely was only January last month and yet it is January only next month. I am not ready for this. I am not ready for my work to be seen although I am more than ready, and yet. There are, I realise, more people reading my work daily than previously, the fear of this could be paralysing. I say could when I mean is. This is the trick of dialogue, I think Marlon James said, that no one ever says what they mean. Bad dialogue reads likes it’s from a film, good dialogue will be sparse. Characters will frequently throw each other off. To be truly authentic, there will be a lot of lies. Everyone will be unreliable.

For a long time, I worked without readers. I wrote nearly every day for a decade. There were many rejections. They were hard years. I am now in the position where I can look back on them differently, I am occasionally nostalgic for them. The absence of a reader. The absence of knowledge as to what this job entails. The luxury then of writing every day without having to pay proper attention to craft. The luxury of being able to stop, change direction, go up poorly lit alleys. This prolonged apprenticeship valuable. Nostalgia is a lie. Balance the horror of discovery against the horror of not being read. And yet. There is increasingly the desire to run away. To be quiet. I shift on the floor. I have discovered I do my best work when physically uncomfortable. I often work in the cold. I enjoy the cold. Dream of snowscapes. I like the sharpness of hunger when I work. I like this hard floor beneath me. You do not become almost dead from starvation by 16 if you simply run away. The starvation years too have become useful. That ability to continue when it is more attractive to not. Tolerable discomforts, always.