Last week I transcribed the last piece of handwritten text that was intended as the conclusion to my next book, Milking Time. It was strange to suddenly encounter my shoebox project as something digitised, converted from a Word document to a PDF file, easily accessible to anyone who might want to read it. I couldn’t believe that all these notes I had been making on what look like scraps of paper amounted cumulatively to at least 60,000 words. The eeriest feeling, however, was how impressed I felt by my own style. Most of the book had been written through 2023, and for the longest time, I was afraid of transcribing it because I couldn’t guarantee I would like what I had composed. As long as the notes were tucked away in the brown cardboard box, they were something I could feel proud of. But confronting them and transcribing each word meant that I had to contend with their worth. Could they be interesting to anyone other than me, was the biggest question on my mind.

At some point, however, it ceased to matter. External validation felt counterproductive and even redundant. What was important was that I sent the book out into the world and launch its trajectory. I never really had control over the book in any case, considering I had chosen to basically write it using the timespan of weekly instalments. Each week, from mid-January 2023, I would imprint my thoughts on borrowed office stationery using my ink pen. At some point I had the idea to do this over the course of 39 weeks, to mimic the period of time our firstborn was inside my womb, since it was a book about maternal subjectivity. I only wrote when I was able to find snatches of time in between the haze of early motherhood, which meant I rarely planned or plotted my thoughts. I allowed for a total free flow. I embodied that Clarice Lispector dictum: ‘I let myself happen’ on the page.