it’s crazy rereading this book and realising how fundamentally it shaped my novel. i read it for the first time just before i started writing the short story that become virtue, and that first draft was really really reminiscent of this book. but i guess via these years of editing it, virtue’s real story came through more and more and has now clarified into its own thing. like things aren’t the same. but the stories definitely exist in the same universe.












