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.”

Eve knows there is interest in her brood of children. Five kids. It’s a lot, these days. It’s a talking point. “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.

Of course she works hard—but she’s also constantly aware of the good fortune she’s had. She’s lucky to have met Nick. She’s lucky to have been fertile and had children. She’s lucky that she’s able to write. She’s lucky her brain came up with the right idea at the right time and she was able to write Hey Big Spender. Well done, you brilliant brain, she thinks—then draws breath to reply. “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. But not just yet. Let me have just a few minutes, he thinks. Just a few more minutes of happy innocence.

“I’ve been here the whole time,” says Nick. “The whole time?” she says in disbelief. “I wasn’t going to leave you, you silly girl.” He reaches out and squeezes her hand. “And the children are fine. Having a whale of a time with your mother, by all accounts.” “Right.”

“She bought it herself,” says Nick. “She said, ‘Mummy can’t be in hospital without a teddy.’ So we went teddy shopping.”

she wants to ask—but at the same time, she doesn’t want to ask. She wants to know, but she doesn’t want to know.

🥺🥺🥺🥺

Five children. Five bundles of love. And five bundles of grief.

“What about mentally? How’s your mood?” I cycle through denial, despair, shock, grief, and then sometimes ridiculous happiness. I appreciate small pleasures so much more than I did, but then along comes the brutal knowledge again. Sometimes I contemplate dying and leaving my family and I can’t bear it. I wait until the house is empty, then cry ugly sobs, inconsolable, loud, keening and wailing, punching the bed with ineffectual, powerless fists….

“I have to hear your voice at the end,” she says. “Please promise me that.”

“Yes,” says Nick thoughtfully. “It’s a fucker. But luckily…” Eve laughs, because “luckily” is their family watch word. Tack it on to any gloomy sentence, they have instructed their children, and you can turn things around, viz: It’s raining. But luckily, we’ve all got umbrellas.

“Better marmalade. Is that your bucket list? Are you Paddington Bear?”

“Maybe I don’t want a bucket list at all. I think what I want is just to live like we do anyway—you know, do our work and go for walks and watch Come Dine with Me—but have a slightly nicer version of it. Normal but better. Call it ‘Normal plus.’ ”

“Seriously,” says Nick, his face suddenly grave. “Anything you want to do, Eve. Anything. I will make it happen. From mango to Machu Picchu to…I don’t know. Fly to the Space Station.”

“You hate spoilers in books and films. We both do. But when it comes to this, all we want, above anything else, is a spoiler. We desperately want the doctors to give us the spoiler, but they can’t, because they don’t know either.”

And finally, I wish everyone reading this a very happy ending.