even for a writer who never shied away from violence. Much of this had to do with Octavia’s state of mind when she was writing the novel. A series of losses filled her with impotent rage, which spills onto its pages. “When a friend and a relative were both dying of cancer,” she wrote, “when another, anorexic and bulimic, was killing herself slowly, when people I loved in general seemed to be doing very badly, I wrote some of the most violent prose I’ve ever written.”89 Her home was also burglarized twice in the space of a few months, leaving her feeling exposed and scared.
