Claire Turnbull is an ex-girlfriend whose life I
ruined. We dated for a spell (relax—no sex) at university, she
reading the Classics, me bog-standard Scottish Literature. One
afternoon as we were discussing the anti-epic properties of Ovid’s
epic The Metamorphoses over two fruit smoothies in a popular
national chain she blurted out that she had written a novel that she
wanted me to read. I was surprised because I had assumed Claire was
from a bourgeois Devonshire background and therefore untalented. She
produced a novel entitled The Corruption of the Enfeebled
Elf-Children and told me I had a
month to read before she wanted the manuscript back to send to
Canongate, who at the time were a brave publisher of innovative new
fiction. I read the novel to page twelve before concluding it
had no artistic merit whatsoever and that Claire should stop writing
or at least attend classes on how to produce a coherent cliché-free
sentence. I was too scared to tell her that truth and so ignored her
texts and emails for a week until she tracked me down in my flat. I
told her that the manuscript was appalling and that it had little
merit and she would need to sweat like a sun-stricken sow to stir up
something semi-fine. She broke down and ran away, I was too tired to
chase her. Later she texted me to wish me a swift and painful death
and that I had ruined her life for the rest of her life (redundancy
sic).
