10 Death. When my son was young I was terrified I was going to die before he was grown up. Now what makes me really angry about death is that I won't know what happened afterwards.
9 Asking questions. I'm afraid of being seen not to know something, the way men don't like asking directions. Of course, I spend my whole life asking questions: as a biographer, I have to do exactly what I'm afraid of.
8 Losing things: a piece of paper, a fact, some key point that I've forgotten to note down. I am an obsessive filer. This has to do with losing control. It is a work fear, connected with my profession. And, of course, if you're that afraid of losing something, you lose it!
7 Loss of civil liberties. I worry that a refugee friend of mine will be "removed" and sent back to his country, to Cameroon, where he will face imprisonment. I am afraid all the legislation that is being passed to deal with controlling immigration has already eaten away at our civil liberties and our democracy.
6 British character changing. I am afraid that stoicism, irony, self-mockery - qualities which enticed me to move to England from Canada - are being lost now. Maybe it's a form of Americanisation. I associate it with Lady Diana: the idea that it's OK for men, for all of us to cry, that we should tell one another that we love one another, all the time. I don't take to that.
5 My work being remembered for the wrong reasons. I worry that my book will be remembered as one of a competitive pair of biographies of Primo Levi, because both books were published at about the same time. Our two biographies may be remembered only for this irrelevant competition. The competition may outlast the biographies themselves.
4 Rivalry in biography. I am afraid ever to have a rival again. In biography, because there are more biographers and fewer subjects, this risk of having a rival gets greater all the time. I may never again have a subject all to myself, as I did with my first one, Jean Rhys.
3 Ageing. I am resigned to perhaps one day not being mobile, but I wouldn't be resigned to losing my brain function or my eyesight. One knows old people who can't read and write any more, and that is a horrifying thought.
2 Negativity, anger and conflict. I am afraid of expressing them and of experiencing them from others. I'm terrified of conflict. If it's connected with something outside me or something I value, I am not afraid to fight for it. But I'm an emotional coward.
1 Rejection. I was good at achieving all my goals, but I never realised that I was going to want to have a man and children in my life. The one area of life that I managed very badly was anything viscerally instinctive and emotional.
