LESLEY CHAMBERLAIN

Reader, I married literature and never divorced it. And now I have to introduce myself as a writer... I've spent much of my life in the company of great German and Russian writers, when there weren't nearly so many writers about... Freud, himself a writer in a high bourgeois age, thought writers were egotists who'd found a clever way to disguise it. Well, up to a point, Herr Doktor. I was thinking about Freud's relationship to writers, and writing, when I wrote my book The Secret Artist A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud in 2000. What's clear is disguises aren't required these days. All publishers want their writers to have a personal story to share with the media.

Primary location: United Kingdom