Like tricky though hapless Jacob in the Bible, I first wooed Leah while desiring Rachel. The wooing of Leah took seven years, the wooing of Rachel another seven years. Leah was my first first novel. Far too ambitious, it was abandoned after 300,000 words. Rachel was my second first novel, even more afflicted by ambition, and was completed at more than 800 pages. The wages of frenzied gluttony – 14 years had flown away. One afternoon, on the very day I finished typing the last sentence, I posted my second first novel to an editor who plied his trade in a New York skyscraper. Back came the manuscript in the mail, with 100 pages all marked up in red pencil – and a note. The note read: “If you do everything my red pencil suggests, and of course there will be more in this vein, we will accept your novel for publication. But if you decline to follow my red pencil’s indispensable advice, then we will decline to publish.”

Fourteen years gone! Outrun by the cohort of my generation, I lusted for print as Jacob panted after Rachel. To the editor I wrote: “Seven years have I labored for these words, and yet another seven years; so I say unto you, Nay, not one jot or tittle will I alter or undo.”

To which the blessed editor replied: “OK, we’ll take it anyway.”

He died suddenly and young, at 42 – I have survived him by decades – and by then I had praised him a thousand times over. And a thousand times over he admonished me: “You think I’m a great editor only because I never edited you.” It is axiomatic, I am obliged to add, that my second first novel (balances zero) has never once met the eye of another living mortal.

And that is how one diffident, obsequious, self-effacing writer became ferociously invisible, at home among the ghosts. And so she remains.