The Memory of Lost Senses by Judith Kinghorn When he interrupted my not-remotely-ready-for-publishers-pitch with, ‘but who will want to read it?’ I knew it wasn’t so much a question as a statement.

I should probably add that he was not in publishing (he was a healthcare professional – which I later discovered to be a euphemism for chiropractor), and he was a guest at a party here at my home. Then, yesterday, I remembered someone, a man… let’s call him a friend of a friend.Īs I politely replied to his obligatory, weary-sounding so what are you writing about? he smiled and rolled his eyes – just as though I was the one hundredth wannabe novelist he’d met that day. There were no critical eyes, no one to put me off my stride or sway me from my innate desire to tell a story, and – eventually, hopefully – for that story to be read. Those days were – and remain – curiously quiet and private, with an intimacy almost sacrosanct in my memory… like the very first weeks and months of my children’s lives.And those days lasted infinitely longer, and were all about writing. Now, I have an inexplicable nostalgia for my unpublished days, before editorial deadlines, before book promotion, before anyone had read or reviewed my writing. And it’s been a very busy three years – literally, gone in a flash. It’s three years since I finished writing what would be my début novel, eventually titled The Last Summer. And after all, it’s what we crave: to be read.

Good reviews will make you vain, they told me, and the bad ones will crush you.Since then, I’ve tried to follow that advice… but as every new -ish writer knows, it’s all too easy to press a button and take a peek at those online reviews. An esteemed British writer, one whose novels have been published for half a century, advised me recently not to read my own book reviews – unless they’re written by someone whose opinion you respect.

The Last Summer by Judith Kinghorn