The Tidal Zone

by Sarah Moss

I looked at my fifteen-year-old daughter. Wouldn’t England be an utterly different country if we didn’t let people talk crap just because they’re posh blokes who write books?

Fiction is the enemy of history. Fiction makes us believe in structure, in beginnings and middles and endings, in tragedy and comedy. There is neither tragedy nor comedy in war, only disorder and harm.

Civilisation, after all, survives on repression: probably all marriages, all families, require the silencing of words that, once spoken, could not be unsaid.

is tradition that the English embrace, not history.

We all live in patterns we do not see. We are all following magic ravens, even when we are lost. Otherwise, there would be no story.

She sighed. ‘It’s one of the problems of you not being on social media, you persistently underestimate the stupidity of everyone else.’

There is a large overlap between ordinary families and those to whom terrible things have happened. It is possible, necessary, to be both.