As the paper dropped in curls to the floorboards, I would have liked to drop and curl up too; as I bled, sweated and shook, something was scraping and chiseling, urgently, inside my body. I felt—and I was right—that I was leaving normal life behind. The rest of the family were in a lively DIY commercial, while I had slid away from them into an after-midnight horror film.

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 231