‘It’s really warping, all these people who don’t know you, who feel like they do’

‘I don’t usually think of writing as catharsis. I usually think of it as something that compels you into therapy,” Meg Mason says. But when the endearing eponymous heroine of her new novel, Sophie, Standing There, “just walked in” to her brain, it soon became clear. Through her story of a lonely literary-festival worker who develops a parasocial relationship with a famous author, she was processing everything she experienced when her previous novel, Sorrow and Bliss , became an international hit.

“It just dramatically changed the nature of my everyday existence and my work, and my sphere expanded enormously,” she says of the “hinge point” that was the book’s success. “It was wonderful, but it was also an upset, in the sense that it turned everything upside down. And I had this desire not to stay too long at the fair.”