I wrote this novel over a five-year period, and definitely at different times I felt drawn to particular characters: I love Madi's ferocious wit and I admired Del's toughness more than I could ever possess myself.
A. I have no inclination to share my "experience" -- in fact, issues have changed so much that I don't consider myself as possessed of valuable "wisdom and perspective".
Today, as a gun-control supporter, I ask myself, what possessed me to do this?
Luckily, a Glasgow-based exorcist – who we'll call Ali – agreed to allow me to watch him, but first, he wanted me to undergo a test to see if I was possessed by a jinn myself.
I started conjuring dreams of pop stardom myself, but I possessed no charisma, and even less talent.
Before I allowed myself to be possessed, Walsh showed me two prints by the late 16th Century painter, Caravaggio, to make a point about the patients who believe they are controlled for real.
The idea is that if the representations I can attribute to myself possess a unity of the right kind, and if I apprehend or am cognitively sensitive to this unity, then I will be able to represent the apperceiving subject of any one of them as identical with that of any other.
And just when I think I'm starting to get the hang of letting things be as they are, some big distraction knows just the way to saunter by and get my attention, get my commitment to possessing it, filling myself up on it.
I doubted myself and wondered what ever possessed me to entertain such a risk.
I could only be myself, and depend on such arts of seduction as I possessed.
