'15 December 2020: Mum diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Should I go be with mum?'

From across the seas that divided us, over the next seven months, that question would twist inside me, helplessly, desperately. I had understood, but not in the truest way of knowing that this, right here, was the beginning of sorrow. I began writing letters to my mother. I knew I was taking notes of the end.

This is an intimate portrait of losing a mother and the ways we are kept apart from those we love by distance, disease and death. It is also a celebration of the salvation of ocean swimming through bereavement and the slow return to a world forever changed by the loss.

What I’m Most Proud Of

I wrote and illustrated my first story when I was six. It was thin on plot – Emily plans a picnic with Rufus, her neighbour – that’s it – but with coconut-lime lollipops.

When I was 14, my dad gave me Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, a play for voices. It centred me like clay on a wheel. I knew all I wanted was to do that with words.

During my ‘going-to-save-the-world’ years, I got a Master’s degree in law from Yale, set up and ran a not-for-profit advocacy centre to end violence against women and sat on the South African Law Commission to help draft new domestic violence legislation. In 1994, Hustler magazine made me ‘Asshole of the Month,’ for my advocacy against violent pornography – it’s still my most prized award.