Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as “slipping away” or “peaceful” has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle. The body clings to life, as ivy to a wall, and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight.

It was painful to write these words, even harder to construct the death scene. I found I couldn’t write these pages in the house, where my own children live. It felt too dangerous, as if I was inviting some terrible hex upon us. So I wrote them outside, in a dilapidated potting shed, with my laptop on my knee. I worked in fifteen-minute bursts, and then had to take a walk around the garden for a while, before I was ready to go on.