I hated my job, and the longer I remained at that workplace, the more I could feel my identity becoming warped by it; the edges of my personality being steadily remoulded. I was conscious that I was misapplying – day-in, day-out – what little talent I had. I wanted to write meaningful fiction the way I’d always planned, but had no time to do so other than in the evenings and at weekends – my generously estimated sixty-nine-and-a-half hours of leisure time.

Still, reading fiction felt like one of a very few strategies I had at my limited disposal for retaining some sense of selfhood while working in a place I despised but was also otherwise underqualified and in a financial situation too precarious to be able to abandon.

I am sure that in an age of relentlessly productive, decreasingly humane and increasingly optimised workplace culture – an age of ever-more detailed time-sheets and tech-enabled employee surveillance – the relative freedoms of office life that allowed writers like myself, Saunders and Vollmann to complete our earliest works at our desks will become near-impossible for future aspirants to avail themselves of. And I am sure that when that happens – when fiction writing once again becomes entirely the pastime of the already time-rich – we will all have a lot less fun reading on our commutes to the jobs we hate.

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