The Guardian has an interview with Michael Cunningham.  Shockingly, although I have seen the film of The Hours I haven't read the book, partly because the film moved me so much I wasn't sure I could take the additional intensity which I am sure the novel contains.  Reading this interview though I am convinced that I need to read him; we are very much on the same wavelength.

I can in no sense compare my efforts at writing to his but this sentiment is one I face daily:

"I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest. You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire – that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book.. .. And it joins all the other books in the world."

And this:

"One of the great things about the novel – and one of the terrible things about writing a novel – is that it takes so long. It's so much about going sentence, by sentence, by sentence."

Is a much more elegant version of this minus the giving up!

And that agonising over what will my mother/children/friends think...?

"A certain slightly cruel disregard for the feelings of living people is simply part of the package. I think a writer, if he's any good, is not an entirely benign entity in the world."

He also name checks two of my favourite novels (Mrs Dalloway and Madame Bovary) and uses my favourite word in the language: interiority*.  

Excuse me while I slip out to buy everything the man has ever written.

 

*Defined for me as that rich and absorbed feeling of talking to my own mind present most palpably in diaries and writing notebooks.