It's an interesting area. Because you could clone your dead husband, you see, so your son would be your husband. It goes right back to Oedipus, and the figure of Jocasta, only instead of being this bizarre accident which nevertheless reveals psychological problems within the family, you've got actual objective chosen reality.

So you're sticking with contemporary rather than historical fiction.

Yes. But it's very difficult, I think, to write good contemporary fiction. It's a lot more difficult than to write historical fiction. You have to look at society through narrowed eyes -- to ask yourself, What is the froth that is on the surface, and what are the actual trends? With historical fiction, this is answered for you. You know what was important because it's still significant now. And all the banner headlines that seemed so significant at the time have simply vanished.

It's true that contemporary novelists haven't often addressed questions of bioethics.

It's difficult. I suppose the people who are attracted to it are ideas led, whereas I think my fiction is character led. I'm interested in ideas, but I'm interested in what the idea means to a character more than I'm interested in the idea itself, although that does matter to me. I would be interested, for example, in why someone would go into the field of bioethics, and how that concern with bioethics would relate to the ethical judgments he or she made in their private life.

That's something I especially like about your fiction -- the characters' work is significant. It's treated as something as important to their identities as, say, their love lives are, if not more so.

I think that goes right back to my early books, like "Union Street." Although the jobs in that book might seem sort of meaningless -- working in the cake factory or prostitution, not jobs that anybody in their right mind would ever care to do -- still, they are chosen and they have a deep impact on people's lives. I'm always very aware of the significance of work, even a repetitive, badly paid or part-time job, what it can do for a woman. Especially when it brings her outside the home, into contact with people. You see women blossoming doing jobs that don't look all that desirable, because it catapults them into that other world.

What about writing as a job?

Writing does not give you enough contact with the outside world. I think it would join the list of jobs you wouldn't advise anybody to do. It's too much inside your own head. Which is why in the end, though I moan about the burden of promoting my books, it is a link to the outside world for me, and I think it's very necessary to do that from time to time. Somebody asked me recently if I think the novelist is a therapist, and I answered that the difference is that you can't determine what people will do with your books. Nor should you try. Once it's published, it's finished and it's not yours anymore.

But increasingly I find I'm invited to talk to scientists, mainly psychiatrists or psychologists. "Regeneration" is used for teaching in medical schools. It's flattering -- or alarming, actually [laughs] -- when you think I've never interviewed a single patient.

Do you accept the invitations?

I don't accept most of them. I researched shell shock during the First World War, and by the time I finished the "Regeneration" trilogy I knew a lot about that. But that's an island of knowledge in a sea of ignorance.

Psychiatrists would probably say they don't know more about human nature than good novelists do.

And they'd probably be right. I do think the whole business of drug therapy and physically based therapy has changed things. But when it comes to feeling your way into the human personality, you are working with someone's personal qualities. A journalist would be just as likely to be able to do it. Have you ever watched a journalist on television who is terribly skilled, and they are talking to a person who's suffered some terrible tragedy, and is lonely and desperate? They are handled so deftly that they forget there's a camera in the room, as if they are talking to a kind doctor, a friend, somebody who understands, and it all comes pouring out. Then the cameras go away, and they're on their own again. And they may have betrayed, for example, the person they are devoting their life to.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"