When I first tried writing about my experiences of being sexually abused I did so by writing a novella. It was called Meta-Metamorphosis and began with the deeply unpromising line: “One morning, after a night of restless dreams, a young man named Gregory Kavanagh awoke to find himself transformed into a Catholic priest.” Luckily my 19-year-old homage to Kafka’s classic tale was consigned to a papery grave where one can only pray that it will for ever remain. It would be thirty years before I tried to write about those experiences again.