I had no idea about the intense physicality of the writing process. You assume you’re dealing with a variation of an office job, a classical sedentary occupation complete with a desk, a chair, piles of paper and the inevitable computer. You allow for psychological strain, of course, but hardly for the immense physical exertion. Writing a book, especially your first one, is more like taking part in the Marathon Des Sables, an endurance race across the Sahara Desert, than completing a protracted and complex mental task. Traumascapes certainly felt like an endurance race. My whole body was dragged into writing, made to work daily. And so it did—getting sick, vomiting, breaking into fever and, more than a few times, collapsing altogether. Perhaps this was the nature of my obsession, which demanded that my entire person be put at the service of this book, that no part of me remain safe or unaffected. Soon enough, writing became inseparable from the continuous process of pushing myself to extremes. I could not write gently, calmly or rationally. Unless I was within striking distance of mental and physical exhaustion, it just did not feel right, I did not feel as though I was doing my job.
 
At the same time, writing Traumascapes was a gradual process of shutting out the world, of leaving an increasing percentage of my phone calls and emails unanswered, of disappointing and infuriating the people I loved, of being a bad everything—daughter, mother, friend … It was impossible to be good and finish this book, to be part of the world and finish this book, to see movies, have drinks, read books and finish this book. I experimented a great deal with sleep deprivation, once going for seven days with less than eight hours of sleep overall and eventually losing all sense of time. The final stages of writing, in particular, were simply incompatible with leading a normal life.
 
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