All barristers, pilots and surgeons have this fear: that you're a fraud. You shouldn't be there. You don't know your case, you don't remember the rules of evidence. What you're best at is lying in bed in a foetal position.
9My books being rejected.
I fear that publishers will turn down my next book because they're ashamed to publish someone with such childish and ungainly handwriting. They'll find me out—the crossings-out… And I worry that my books will not be read until after I'm dead. I also fear that I'll have to rewrite the books I've written from memory.
8Losing my degree.
I dread being told that my qualifications to practice law are going to be taken away, due to the discovery of an apparently minor requirement that I failed to satisfy while a student.
7 A sudden exam.
I have a fear of being given a three-hour written exam on a subject I never took or that I took years ago and have forgotten. Or a subject I know about but where the questions are nonsensical. I once had a nightmare in which I was sitting a family law exam and one of the questions was: Your parents divorced because of a) economic factors, b) you, c) economic factors and you, d) the Jews. I also fear hyperventilating in public again as I did in my Economics 301 exam, and being recognised by any of the 999 other people that took Economics 301 at Melbourne's Monash University in 1984.
6 Being a writer.
I fear a realisation that I made an irrevocable decision which will lead me to economic and social humiliation, and ultimately to homelessness. It's an almost existential fear that I shouldn't be writing, living in New York, travelling… I should be in a little office somewhere making a living as a lawyer.
5Extremism, both political and religious.
I am afraid that it's become uncontrollable, and that the movement towards the Enlightenment and rationality, social progress and the diminution of disparity between the richest and poorest has stopped.
4Not being able to support my children.
This is a fear of failure, of inadequacy, of slipping out of the middle class. I fear not being able to help my children, do the right thing by them, protect them, make them happy. I don't have any children.
3Dancing like my father.
I have a horror of being forced to go to all the wedding receptions I've ever been to again and realising that everyone else has left the dancefloor and I'm dancing alone, and like my father.
2The death of people I love will be my fault.
Losing them is the worst fear, but I fear that the way they will die will be my fault, that I should have done something other people would have thought of doing—but I couldn't do it, wasn't good enough.
1Articulating my fears.
If I really got to the core of my fears I wouldn't be able to write any more. By imagining the fears of my characters I can inhabit their worlds.
