On the Lunar Eclipse at the Full Moon, Finally Letting Go of an Old Verdict, and the Fear of Reading Your Work Aloud — a writer’s diary entry, 28th of August

Alarm at half five, set on purpose, and out into the lane in a cardigan over my nightdress with the wet coming up off the grass and nothing awake but a dog two houses down who has never approved of me. The moon was exactly where they said it would be, low in the west over the poplars, nearly all of it swallowed and the rest gone the colour of an old penny. Behind me the east was already going grey. I stood on the tarmac for the better part of an hour with my head back like a fool and watched it go down into the trees still bitten.

A full moon and an eclipse are the same night by definition. The eclipse is the earth putting itself between the sun and a full moon, it cannot be any other night, and I did know this. I stood there feeling got at regardless. Ninety-six per cent of it in shadow, they said, the deepest one until the end of 2028. It looked like something being quietly taken back. The second eclipse of the month, after the sun went in the middle of August. Whatever is going on up there, it has been thorough about it.

So I had brought a piece of paper out with me, because I had decided beforehand that I would. It has been in the second drawer of the desk since 2011. A feedback sheet from a residential week in Devon, from a tutor whose books I had read on the train down, in biro, and the word on it was competent. Competent, with moments. Three lines and a tick box. I have spent fifteen years trying to prove that man wrong. He has no idea. I would put money on him not remembering the week, let alone me.

You are not allowed to burn anything here. It is against the law, garden waste and all, and in August with the woods as dry as they are you would have half the commune out of their beds and quite right too. So the great ceremonial release consisted of me coming back into the kitchen at ten to seven, tearing a sheet of A4 into pieces small enough to be unreadable, and running the tap on them. Anti-climax, which felt about correct. I put the kettle on. My hand went flat on my chest for a moment without my deciding it, that thing from Saturday, and I let it stay there.

What I actually gave up was not the paper. It was the arrangement I have had going since Devon, which is that everything I write is evidence in a case, and the case is being heard, and there is a verdict coming. There is no case. There is a chapter with an ending that doesn’t work yet.

Which brings me to the fortnight. I am reading chapter one to the group. Aloud, in a room, to nine people who have eaten at my table. And this book is not the woman they think they have got. They know me as the one who writes the comforting things, the quotes and the small kindnesses and the pages you go to when you are having a bad week. This one has a cruelty in it that I have not let myself put on a page before, and it is better for it, and there is a passage on page four that I have already caught myself considering cutting for no reason except that I will have to say it out loud with my own mouth while Marguerite looks at me.

I will not cut it. Writing that down here so that I have to be a person who said it.

The moon was gone by ten past seven, into the poplars and away, and the sky went that ridiculous pink over the maize and then it was simply Friday. I made the coffee. I sat back down with the chapter at twenty past. That is the whole of it, and it is more than enough for one morning.