I wrote a first draft of the exegesis in two weeks and sent it off to Nick. It sounds easy — but the pre-writing had lasted for four agonising years. And it was only a irst draft. I fully expected months of painful redrafting; I'd watched enough of my fellow PhD candidates sweat blood through the final weeks of their PhDs to know what was ahead of me. What I hadn't expected was how useful writing the exegesis would be. It clarified my thinking. On the page, contained in a 20,000 word essay, some problems which had seemed insurmountable suddenly looked manageable. A few solutions seemed laughably easy.

For instance, the concept of subtlety was a farce. Why would you want to be subtle? To hide the fact that you don't know what you're doing. The answer was like being punched it the gut. It was true. I was trying to fool everyone into thinking I knew what I was doing, and I didn't. This was why nothing worked, because I couldn't answer the question ‘why’. Not for Molly, and not for me. And perhaps I wouldn't be able to before the PhD was due. I launched into a sixth and final draft of the novel, making it clearer that Molly was writing Gienia's story.

At the end of January I went to see Nick. Unbelievably, he had minimal notes on the exegesis. I needed to add a chapter here, unpack a few points there, and define my terms more thoroughly.