A Page in the Life: Susie Boyt Boyt is on good terms with her half-siblings. She read Esther Freud's novel Hideous Kinky, which casts their father in a less-than-flattering light, in draft. I never felt any competition with the other children because he did things with us so separately. I felt the things we did when I saw him were very special, and the things the others did with him were special for them. She says she only became close to her father when he painted her portrait, which he did three times. It was very one-to-one, very intense over very many days. He might talk about something. I'd go and look it up, and we'd carry on talking about it the next day. Many of Freud's sitters have commented that having been the centre of the artist's attention during the long and arduous process of painting, they felt a sense of loss when that attention moved elsewhere once the work was over. I wonder if Boyt found that painful. "I was never very brilliant at the sitting still part, so there was always an element of relief when a painting came to an end," she says. And even after that we would go out together when he'd finished work, to various watering holes around Piccadilly. There are whole swathes of London that don't feel so promising now Dad's not there to go there with. Thinking about Freud's various partners and children, you can't help feeling that people were hugely indulgent towards him. Didn't she ever feel annoyed with her father? "Somehow the word "annoyed" feels too small. Our relationship was on a bigger stage than that. He had an amazing capacity to inspire love in those who knew him. It was something so marked you couldn't ignore it. Boyt's financially insecure childhood seems to have resolved itself in her adult life; she now lives in a large north London house with her husband, a film producer, and children. If you'd shown me when I was 14 or even 21 what my life is like now, I'd have fallen off my chair. Her novel The Small Hours is, she says, about the complications that can arise when we make our dreams come true. Harriet makes too big a leap from where she is to where she wants to be. Despite the book's painful ending, there's the sense that its heroine, with all her gaucheness and contradictions, caught between self-loathing and an odd kind of grandeur, will bounce back. "I wanted to show that something doesn't have to last forever to have value," she says. Harriet's school ends in disaster, but it's clear that many of the children who took part benefited greatly from it. And I wanted to leave room for Harriet herself to have a second act, though I won't be writing it. The Small Hours by Susie Boyt is published by Virago at £14.99