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Bartering With The Facts: How a Novelist Solves a Historical Problem

An essay in Publishers Weekly on truth and accuracy in historical fiction

‘Having bestrewn my novel with pockets, for example, I discovered that the clothes of European medieval men and women didn’t have them. No pockets? Where did they put their things? Where did they put their cold hands?’

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Brief, Brutal and Gone

An essay for Powell’s asking what anxiety is and whether people had it in the Middle Ages

‘Firstly, I don’t sleep much anymore. A year ago sleep left me. I’ve spent the year in a complex postmortem of the sort that often follows a relationship breakup. What did I do to make it leave? What can I do to get it back? Is it possible to learn to survive without it? A year of counseling, hypnotherapy, acupuncture, mindfulness, CBT, meditation, supplements, drugs, and general earnest searching has left my questions with the following answers, respectively: Unclear. Unclear. No. 

The two or three years prior to that I’d been working on a novel set in the late middle ages, whose genesis was confession — confession of the Catholic sort that happens in a booth, a little dark box. I’m not a Catholic and have never confessed, but I’m drawn to the idea of this little dark box. The waiting priest, ear to the grille. The stooped, whispering penitent. A bizarre, mystic theatre. Alongside that, mundane everydayness — spiritual absolution made routine. You come in, you confess, you agree to a penance and you are absolved; it might take less than five minutes. In the middle ages, the overworked priest urged his penitent to be brief, be brutal, be gone.’ 

Read the essay

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When a Story is Best Told Backwards

An essay for Literary Hub about telling a story with a reverse narrative