[I know] quite well what kind of society I would like: decentralized, nonauthoritarian, communist, nonsexist - a society in which people can be in touch with their feelings, and in control of their lives. But it always sounds both ridiculous and unattainable when you put it into words.

I don't know. That must be part of it. The fact that I was an only child may have helped. I had friends, but I did have quite a lot of time when I could be alone. Planning stories would be like solitary playing. I would invent a lot of characters, and descriptions of where they lived and maps, and it would be a whole game. So there was that sort of overlap. I also had a very close friend and we used to play a game which, looking back, reached a point where it was more like improvising plays.

I was also separately interested in the theatre. I liked going to plays. I used to want there to be plays done at school, and there weren't. When I was fifteen, I went off to a summer theatre in Canada, outside Montreal, and painted scenery. I didn't really put the two things together till a few years after that, at university.