Tomek functions in the world, he holds down his job, but like someone with a serious mental illness he makes objects of other people; it seems he cannot enter into any human feelings but his own. Or perhaps this is exactly what obsession is like: an intolerable, pathological narrowing of focus, to which any of us could fall victim in the course of our lives.

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 381