Sally Rooney on steroids

To lessen the side effects of chemotherapy I am prescribed a corticosteroid. I take a whopping dose around the treatment dates and a maintenance dose the rest of the time. The physical side effects of prednisolone are sweating, insomnia, a gargantuan appetite and a moon face. The mental effects are similar to those of decent coke: an afflatus of delightedness and collected wits spoiled by an indiscriminating faith in the truth of my own thoughts, and an overwhelming and grandiose desire to express these marvellous thoughts verbally to other people.

Grandiosity in an invalid is not a good look. But people excuse it. Acquaintances who I haven’t seen for a while, but who have heard I’ve been up and down to Marseille for chemotherapy, are bemused by my cheerfulness and pedagogy. ‘Goodness, you look so happy and well!’ they say. ‘It’s only the steroids,’ I say. And we all laugh.

Occasionally, I also have delusional manias. A recent one concerned the novelist Sally Rooney. The reviews I read of her latest book Beautiful World, Where Are You were mostly grumpy. But reading between the lines it seemed that here at last was our great white hope. Until that point, I had not knowingly read anything written by her. In fact, in my chauvinist mind I had the name Sally Rooney idiotically conflated with the novelist Anne Tyler, one of whose novels — I can’t remember which — I had read about a quarter of.

Then a friend said that she happened to be reading it and had almost finished it and that if I went to her house the next day she would pass it on. So rising late the next morning, I popped a couple of steroids and drove ten miles to where she lived in an old stone Provençal villa in a forest.