Swimming Lessons

“Secret truths . . . are the lifeblood of a writer. Your memories and your own secrets. Forget plot, character, structure; if you’re going to call yourself a writer, you need to stick your hand in the mire up to the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder and drag out your darkest, most private truth.”

"We must have spent most of that time without clothes when we were indoors; do you remember me surprising the postman as he stood at the front door with a letter to be signed for? After I returned to bed I told you how his gaze had started on my face and slid downwards at the same rate as his eyebrows went up.
. . .
The envelope stayed where you dropped it, unopened on the floor, another document marking time with the rings of coffee cups. (Later I found burned pieces of it amongst the nettles, and it was years before I understood its significance.)"

“‘Forget that first-edition, signed-by-the-author nonsense. Fiction is about readers. Without readers there is no point in books, and therefore they are as important as the author, perhaps more important. But often the only way to see what a reader thought, how they lived when they were reading, is to examine what they left behind. All these words’ – Gil swung his arm out to encompass the table, the room, the house – ‘are about the reader. The specific individual – man, woman or child – who left something of themselves behind.’”

"Gil slowed but continued to shuffle, head lowered, along the promenade until below him the sand ended and the breakwater boulders and the massive concrete blocks began, wet with leaping spray. The rain flew in his face and the wind buffeted him, pushing him into the metal railing at the edge of the walkway, tilting him over it as though he were being passed from hand to hand in a violent dance.”

Dear Gil, Of course I couldn't write the story of a marriage in one letter. It was always going to to take longer. After I finished my first letter I meant to send it straight away. I found an envelope from an old electricity bill in the kitchen table drawer, and thought I'd walk to the postbox as the sun came up before I could change my mind. But perched on the arm of the sofa in the dark with the pen in my hand there was a noise from the girl's room (the squeak of bedsprings , the creak of the door), and without thinking I grabbed a book from the nearest shelf, shoved the letter inside and pushed it back into place.