‘I saw your book in the National Theatre bookshop last week!’ says an excited friend, happy to bring good news. I smile. My stomach drops. I don’t ask how many copies there were on the shelf, although if I had been in the shop I would probably have counted them furtively. There are two possibilities: either there are only a few, perhaps just one, and they haven’t sold it, which is why it’s still there, or there are lots of copies, in which case it’s unpopular and tragic. I hate seeing my books in bookshops. I hate it when the finished copies arrive in their cardboard boxes or puffy postbags. Somebody once told me that they saw a person in New York using one of my books as a pillow while sleeping on the street. It seemed believable.

I’ve heard other authors say how exciting it is finally to have your book in your hands. To me, it’s horrifying. It is now too late to change the bits I know I will hate if I open the thing. And when I see it in the wild, as authors call it, it’s like those dreams where you arrive at school and discover you are naked. Samuel Johnson observed that no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. Whenever I say this, or something like it, to others, they tend to react with amazement. Their rather quaint view is that everybody longs for publication. But is it all we hope for? In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott offers a searing depiction of publication day, contrasting expectations – a constantly ringing phone, a plethora of notices – with reality, in which nothing happens. Nowadays, the writer might also be on the lookout for pre-publication reviews on Amazon and Goodreads by people who have never read the book but have something against either the writer or the subject. And then there is the money. In 2022, the average income of professional authors in the UK was approximately £7,000 a year.

Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge the writers who intelligently evade the question of publicity or publication. Many published writers avoid publicity; the most notorious case is Thomas Pynchon, who has succeeded in evading it to such an extent that nobody knows what he looks like. Long before Pynchon, Emily Brontë