Anna Burns

I came to understand how much I’d been closed down, how much I’d been thwarted into a carefully constructed nothingness by that man. Also by the community, by the very mental atmosphere, that minutiae of invasion.

a recklessness, an abandonment, a rejection of me by me – had returned to me. I was going to die anyway, wouldn’t live long anyway, any day now I’d be dead, all the time, violently murdered – and that, I now understand, gave a certain edge. It offered a different perspective, a freeing-up of the fear option.

Then again, I knew all along it wouldn’t be over. With these sorts of things you have to take each day, each person, each reprisal, at a time.