When my father began to be ill, with a brain tumor, in 1987, '88, I was living in London and I came back and began to look... look after him. And there – he was in Elizabeth... Elizabeth, New Jersey – I took a hotel room in... in New York because I couldn't go from Connecticut to New Jersey all the time and travelled over to New Jersey every day to talk to him, take a walk with him, take him to the doctor when he had to go. And then I'd to come back to New York in... in the evening and I found I didn't really want to see any... any of my friends, have dinner with anybody, and I didn't want to do any of that stuff. I was too down for it.

I... I tried not to let him know I was down and was falsely cheerful as people are in those situations. But I didn't know what... what to do with myself, so at night I began to write down what had happened during the day. Just to get it down. I had no other motive. But after the months went by, I had accumulated quite a few notes and it occurred to me that I was writing a book about his end. And I didn't know how the end would end, but I knew it would end, in time. And it did, of course. And then after he was dead, I put the pages together and – fortunately I had a very good record now of what had been going on – and I made a book out of it, a non-fiction book, a memoir called Patrimony. I was... I was writing it as we were going along, so it was never a burden to me, I never had to think, how will I write this? I just wrote it, and that's how it came... that's how it came to be.