Was your life, and the daring lives of your characters, the life I longed for? In school, I had known outgoing girls similar to your younger heroines. Girls who were brimming with confidence, unencumbered by shyness. They had boyfriends who rode motorcycles and they dabbled in weed and unchaperoned meetings. These girls glittered out of my reach. I ached for recognition from them – one of my diary entries at the age of thirteen reads, ‘What I want is that when they are asked who this girl (me) is, their answer would be this is so and so, she is quite nice but I don’t know her very well. This is not what is happening now. They don’t even know my name!’ Your heroines are a resurrection of those sparkling girls who I was invisible to. So you see, your writing did not transport me to another world but instead welcomed me into conversations and outings that had been barred to me. It was as if, in the reading, I were mixing with people who had at one time brushed past me. Thank you for this access.

And for being there for me when I came out of hospital – once the painkillers had worn off, your paperback was the alternative drug. When we moved house – putting your hardback up on the new shelves from John Lewis. When I had the miscarriage – one of the nurses was also called Selma. When I got my first laptop – typing you a letter. When my father passed away – his funeral exactly like the one you described. When I enrolled in the Open University and told you about it in a letter. When we went on holiday to Barcelona and I came across Frutos de Loto in a bookshop near the hotel. I had written about Fruit Lotus, my favourite of all your novels, to the Richard and Judy Book Club when they first started asking for viewer recommendations. In those years you were often unfairly overlooked, consistently underrated. I was one of your early champions, long before you became mainstream.