What Does It Feel Like?

by Sophie Kinsella

My advice is to write the book you would like to read yourself. Visualize going into a bookshop and finding the perfect book. The book you would buy immediately. What does it look like? What’s it about? What genre is it? Then write that book. And above all, write the truth. Write what you know and do it convincingly. I don’t mean write nonfiction,” she clarifies. “I mean write the truth about life, whatever genre you’re in.”

“What does it feel like to have five children?” people ask, and all she can say is, “The same as having one child, times five.” The work is multiplied, the worry is multiplied, the joy is multiplied, the love is multiplied.

“I’ve been so incredibly fortunate, it almost seems like too much luck for one person,” she says truthfully to Antonia Horton. “Now I’m just waiting for my luck to run out!”

You have incurable cancer, my beautiful Eve. But you keep forgetting and I have to keep reminding you and these are the hardest moments of my life.

He will tell her the truth, as he has told her on every walk. And he will deal with her shock, as he has done on every walk. He will deal with her questions, her tears, her worries, her fears for the children. For all of them.

I may never see you grow up, my beautiful girl, and I can’t bear it.

“Hello, it’s Eve Monroe for the plastic chairs. Sorry, I mean, for a flat white.”

I am greedy for sleep, I want only sleep. I seek unconsciousness like a crack addict seeking a hit.

felt

All the way through, tell yourself that this treatment will flood your brain with healing and vanish any remaining cancerous debris. Manifest it to be true. Will it to be true. Make it be true.

I’m joking. The way to get through chemotherapy side effects: Go to bed.

amen