When my sister, Jennifer, was being delivered, the forceps crushed both sides of her skull, and as a result she had a motor tremor. Her hands and body shook, like a palsy, which meant she was not able to manage her food properly. She couldn’t pick up a cup of tea or handle a glass of water, which was a torment when she was a teenager. Otherwise she was normal. She was a very intelligent, sweet-natured person — when not obliged to go out in public and be embarrassed by her disability.

I was tremendously sympathetic to her always, but my mother, who was a very feisty character, would try to bully her into being brave and going to the cinema and parties with the rest of us, in order to show that she didn’t mind about her disability. But my sister minded tremendously. She was very sensitive. So there would be huge arguments between them, slammed and locked doors and that kind of thing.

Then, when my sister was 19 or 20, our doctor noticed that a technique of freezing irritant brain cells in just this kind of condition had been developed by some neurologists in Newcastle. Jennifer went and was operated on there, and was almost completely cured. I say “almost” because, although after that you wouldn’t notice she had any kind of physical disability — indeed, you might have thought this was a miraculous recovery — in fact it was the beginning of the tragedy. Because, not having had the normal life of a teenage girl, with boyfriends and going out to parties, she went mad for that kind of thing, and got into all kinds of undesirable entanglements with men. A married man, for example, which went badly wrong. And because she was emotionally inexperienced, it affected her tremendously, and she attempted suicide as a result of that affair.

About six years after this operation she met a man 20 years her senior, and within a few months married him, and they went to live in Johannesburg. They’d not been married more than a couple of months when he reported her missing. There was the most tremendous police search for her, and they had to dig up all the details of what had happened in this period of time when she was liberated into madness by the operation. And all sorts of things came out about the preceding six years, things that my parents hadn’t known about or suspected. It was a very awful and disturbing time.

And then, tragically, Jennifer’s body was found in a river. She’d been stabbed to death. The murder weapon, which was found in her home, was a knife from their kitchen. Her husband was arrested and indicted with her murder, and tried for it, and acquitted on the grounds that such evidence as there was against him was all circumstantial. There was nothing that could conclusively satisfy a jury that it was he who had wielded the knife, so he was acquitted on the grounds of insufficient evidence. Her murderer was never found.

If the awful circumstances of her murder weren’t bad enough, it was compounded by the fact that the terrible strain and shock of what happened gave my mother a heart attack a few weeks later, and she died. I flew over to be with my father, and as he got into bed at night in the next room, I could hear him sighing. I thought this crushing burden of grief must be utterly unbearable.

I used to fantasise that if it were possible to move a burden of suffering from one person to another, I would take it on.

The truth about murder is that the murderer also kills something in the lives of other people. That’s what’s so horrible about it: the person who is killed is killed, but the people who are worst affected are the survivors.

You can learn to live with grief or tragedy or trauma by having a strategy for dealing with it. You might confront it and have years of therapy. I’ve become a workaholic, and I work every moment I’m awake if I can, partly because it does have this liberating and relieving effect.

One thing I want to stress: my sister’s and mother’s deaths, so close together, which had a terrible impact on my family, are big tragedies, but they are unfortunately commonplaces of the human experience. There are plenty of people who have such tragedies, and worse. I think of all the families in Iraq, day by day, who are having even more members of their family wiped out in one go. And so, because life has this big thick streak of tragedy that runs through it, it makes it all the more necessary and important to really put one’s best efforts into doing something of value, something that is good or positive.

A lot of what I write and lecture about is the attempt to try to construct a good life that is well worth living.

And, given the brevity of life — the average human life is less than 1,000 months long — there’s not a great deal of margin for wasting time.

Interview: Danny Danziger.

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