The Diary of a Debut | 4th to 6th March 2011

Literary festivals, meeting Lionel Shriver

Hopes and Doubts — The Diary of a Debut

My first book, Before I Go to Sleep, first came out in April 2011. I’d completely forgotten that in the January of that year I started keeping a journal to chronicle things as they happened.

My entries were sporadic, and some intensely personal. I’ve tried to edit it as little as possible, however.

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4th March, 2011

Aldeburgh literary festival. We had rover tickets, which means we basically bought a ticket for every event, and not at a discount, though it did mean we didn’t have to decide in advance which talks to go to. Which was good, as it turned out, as there were some great events that I I went to that I’d never have bought an individual ticket to.

The opening event was a case in point. Robin Hanbury-Tenison, an explorer, talked about his new book which was about the world’s greatest explorers. Fascinated to learn that the first person to circumnavigate the globe was not an explorer but a slave, and that a French explorer, Bougainville, took with him a female valet who apparently ‘passed’ as a man until arriving in Tahiti.

Following that Paul Bailey talked about his new book, Chapman’s Odyssey, for about two minutes and then read from it for eighteen (it’d have been much MUCH better if he’d done it the other way round - I must remember that reading from a book is essentially really really boring, necessitating, as it does, the listener concentrate really quite intensely).