Sue Wootton
Michel Faber is the award-winning author of several novels and collections of short stories, among them The Crimson Petal and the White, Under the Skin and The Book of Strange New Things. Born in 1960 in the Netherlands, Faber’s family migrated to Australia in 1967 where he was educated and for many years worked as a nurse. Faber now lives and writes in the Scottish Highlands.
In 2014 his wife, Eva Youren, died from multiple myeloma. Undying: A Love Story is a collection of poems that chronicles Faber’s grief. He wrote two of the poems while Eva was very ill, and most of the rest on the other side of her death, in the strange new world of bereavement – “a world”, he writes, “that did not have my dearest friend in it”.
I hadn’t known such need for poetry before. I wish I’d lived into my nineties, with Eva at my side, and never written these things.”
She has a lived-in face and a voice which speaks of late night music and low lights, a soft husky catch of a voice which always has at its end the suggestion of a laugh. But she’s serious, on the level, is Ronnie.
Three years ago my partner asked me to deliver a gift to Carolyn, a friend of hers who was a patient at the 
A is for Anxiety