Fuck yeah, Jeanette Winterson!

Over the next few weeks we wooed each other in fonts and pixels - an email courtship that couldn’t be happening, I thought, because Susie was heterosexual and I have given up missionary work with heterosexual women. But something was going on and I had no idea what to do about it. I had lunch with my friend, the writer Ali Smith. She said, ‘Just kiss her.’

Susie went to talk to her daughter in New York. Lianna said, ‘Just kiss her, Mummy.’

So we did.

When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you? I had no idea. I thought that love was loss.

Why is the measure of love loss?

That was the opening line of a novel of mine - Written on the Body (1992). I was stalking love, trapping love, losing love, longing for love.

What is desire? Desire is a restaurant. Desire is watching you eat. Desire is pouring wine for you. Desire is looking at the menu and wondering what it would be like to kiss you. Desire is the surprise of your skin. Look - in between us now are the props of ordinary life - glasses, knives, cloths, Time has been here before. History has had you - and me too. My hand has brushed against yours for centuries. The props change, but not this. Not this single naked wanting you.

“Love without thought. Love without conditions. Love without promises. Love without threats. Love without fear. Love without limits. Love without end.

I think she did love me, for a minute, for a second, for the time it takes to remember, for the time it takes to forget. We had twenty-eight days together and then I was gone.”

We are nothing, and we are everything. Look up — every star another world, but what I seek, near or far, is love’s outline in your face.

“We made love by our fire, watching the snow shape the entrance to the cave.

When I touch her, my fingers don’t question what she is. My body knows who she is. The strange thing about strangers is that they are unknown and known. There is a pattern to her, a shape I understand, a private geometry that numbers mine. She is a maze where I got lost years ago, and now find the way out. She is the missing map. She is the place that I am.”

Love is an experiment,” she said. “What happens next is always surprising.