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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary end for The Spectator, and I'm very pleased to be joined this week by the writer Sirie Husband,

whose new book is not, as you might often expect, a novel,

but a collection of essays called mothers, fathers and others new essays. Siri, welcome.

Thank you. To start with looking at this collection, you know, you're best known for your fiction,

but how do you see essays as a form?

Are they a kind of compliment to your fiction?

Are they something totally different that you do?

I no longer think they're totally different, but I actually for quite a long time now have been inhabiting two worlds.

I chose these essays because I consider them to be essays that can be read by

interested, intelligent people, but they are not specialized. I have also published a number of

essays in academic journals, given scholarly lectures, and in various fields, philosophy, neurology,

psychiatry, neuroscience. So that part of my life continues. And I have another book of really much

more scholarly essays that I'm also putting together. So the essay is deeply part of my life.

And I have to say even in the scholarly works except for commentaries, for example,

a peer review commentary for someone, I use the first person.

And because I have formally rejected the ordinary third person academic voice.

I think it's a voice of authority that can lead people astray.

I mean, these essays, you describe yourself in them as an intellectual vagabond as someone who crosses borders, is interested in science and in arts.

I mean, how much do you think that ability to transgress, the ability to do, as it were, take insights from neuroscience or from theoretical psychiatry and to mesh them

...