‘Thirty years ago, I interviewed Johnny Cash at home in Hendserson Tennessee. He said to me, among many other things, ‘Louisa, you gotta be who you are. Whoever you are, you gotta be it.’ At the time, it helped me overcome some natural insecurities and start writing books; now, it has helped me realise that if a novel-writing woman of 59 wants to form a band with her daughter’s boyfriend and make a record of her songs about her dead fiancé, there’s nothing stopping her but her own institutionalised acceptance of agist and sexist views of human creativity. And sod that for a lark.

‘The song Boston Crown came to me in a dream: Johnny Cash singing it, in a French bar. I’d never heard it before. Half asleep, I desperately memorised the words so I could scribble them down with my eyes shut, so I could google it when I woke up properly. Which I did. It didn’t exist. Yet I heard him sing it, in my dream. So I wrote it.

‘It turns out to be much easier simpler and cheaper to write your own songs than try to quote other people’s lyrics in novels. Twelve Months And a Day has several new songs in it — You’re My Everything, Blackbird, and others. To hear them sung, you need to get the audiobook, read beautifully by Isabel Adomakoh Young. Or ask me, if you run into me.’