I don’t think about hope. I don’t think that’s my job. I like the idea that inducing hope is something my characters do. Because it’s a default activity—we wake up, and we hope to presume that life’s going to be good today. When we’re met with difficulty, we hope that things will improve. But I think that negative capability is very useful for a writer because the truth is that life is blind. We don’t know anything, most of the time. We overestimate our intelligence, we overestimate our knowledge of events, and we completely underestimate complexity. We move through the labyrinth, all the time. Life is elaborate. I try to give form to that in my stories, to shape narratives that can actually convey the sense of the labyrinth, the sense that we are blind, and that the world is truly unknown, unknown to us. And, you know, it goes back to the Greeks. In many ways, Eilish is almost Greek in that she’s constantly making decisions to try and outmanoeuvre the fates. But what’s taking place around her is far beyond her powers and comprehension, and this is something that I’m always interested in. That sense of human agency within the vast and different world. The fact that we as human beings are always trying to find our lives, we’re trying to find meaning for who we are. But the world around us is silent, it is indifferent, and it doesn’t give a damn. And how do you reconcile these two things? The modern world is defined by individuality. And yet, every so often, all of us will have an encounter with reality.