In the years when the girls were young she had wanted to write about what it was like to house things inside her, how it was possible to be both skin and flesh and also mortar and plaster. She pitied the Settle House and the house in Oxford then, understood better what it felt like to be filled up with noise and pain, understood why the walls sometimes seemed to crumple in on themselves. After she’d given birth she felt emptied out, like a beloved house closed up for the winter.
