In 1975, McEwan’s tales of sibling incest, cross-dressing and cat-roasting children in First Love, Last Rites scandalised critics. Yet today we are no more liberated, just culturally confused
In 1970, when I was 22, I moved to Norwich and lodged in a small, pleasant room on the edge of the city. I had come to do an MA in English at the University of East Anglia, but my overriding purpose was to write fiction. At the end of my first week, with all arrangements made, I sat down at a card table by the end of my bed one evening and told myself that I would work continuously through the night until I had completed an entire short story. I had no notes, only a scrap, a dreamy notion of what sort of story this would be.
Within an hour, a strange voice was talking to me from the page. I let it speak. I worked on into the night, filled with a romantic sense of myself, the writer heroically driven by a compelling idea, pushing on towards dawn as the city slept. I finished around 6 o’clock.
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