Finishing a book is like waking, cured, from an illness; a fever perhaps, something febrile and unwavering. When I am in the grip of a book everything but the writing of the book falls away: in the old days, before I was a mother and a partner, I could even go for long stretches without eating, washing, cleaning, all the things you believe necessary to life. I ate only enough to keep going, and sort of dug a hole in the mess of clothes, manuscripts, books and papers on the bed, and then dug my way out again before the sun was up to begin again.

In Claudia Roth Pierpont’s new life of Philip Roth, Roth Unbound, she mentions Roth’s fondness for quoting the poet Cseslaw Milosz’s adage that “when a writer is born into a family, the family is finished” (Roth himself might have added wives and lovers to that definition).

It’s sad but true that a writer’s unwavering focus and dedication to finishing a book can make partners feel abandoned. I don’t think many people other than artists could understand, say, the artist Barbara Hepworth’s decision to give away her triplets to a kind of up-market baby home (not an actual orphanage but – in essence – a place to park her babies for a good many years while she got on with her work).

Now, with kids and a partner, any spare time is for them. I cut out social media; I cut out going out, except to essential events (Christmas? OK, I’ll do lunch). I had a finite period of time off from my day job, six months to be exact, starting from last November – which unfortunately coincided with the Christmas-New Year holiday season – and which effectively meant I didn’t go to the beach the whole summer. I worked pretty much every day, seven days a week – not all day, that would even do my mad-writer’s-brain head in – but for a couple of hours, and sometimes several hours.

I’m finished. Some 70,000 words – I use an old fashioned, hand-drawn paper calendar on which I write each day’s word count. I already feel sad that the writing is over because – in truth – I only ever really feel like a writer when I am actually writing. And this bit is my favourite bit – the work done, not yet published, not yet edited, reviewed, read – just a private dream, realized. It is a small, modest dream, but it’s my dream and, for the moment, I’m happy. I’m no Philip Roth (sadly) but, like him, I like the German notion of maskenfreiheit to describe fiction: “the freedom conferred by masks”. Making a fiction is an elaborate play with masks and I love playing.