Rita asked Maggie O'Farrell:

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Maggie O'Farrell One of my children has dyslexia. It wasn’t something I had any experience of, although I wonder now about those kids in my 1970s primary school class who never progressed beyond the first-level reading books. As a mother, it completely floored me: I had no idea how to help someone who couldn’t differentiate between ‘a’ and ‘g’, ‘f’ and ’t’, or ’s’ and ‘5’. Luckily, these days, help is out there if you need it. I kept thinking, however, what it must have been like to grow up in a time when the diagnosis didn’t exist, when it wasn’t recognised, a time before all the books and research hadn’t been written. That’s where the character of Aoife came from.

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