When I wrote that drama, some six years before, my marriage was apparently intact and happy. I wonder now, if the empathy I felt for Flora's anguish in the face of her husband's betrayal was quite as theoretical as it seemed at the time. Its prescience was now chilling.Pop psychology would say that my husband, unable to confront the prospect of admitting his unfaithfulness, summoned his unconscious to do it for him in his sleep. Had I used my own unconscious, in the same way, in the story of The Politician's Wife and Flora's inability to forgive? I re-read the scripts recently and observed that I sometimes described Flora as: "motionless, like someone asleep, standing up".

I wonder, now, if the unacknowledged tension in my own marriage was really the imperative that prompted that piece of work. If Flora was a sleepwalker, then so was I.Psychologists also often say your unconscious mind is your friend, manifesting in dreams as warnings about dilemmas too difficult to confront. Now, six years later, I have to face the possibility that I ignored the warning in The Politician's Wife. If that was a mistake, a greater one would be to dismiss as mere coincidence the fact that my life was now mirroring my work.That Grace Hazlett in State of Mind was a psychologist is also no coincidence. The producer, Eileen Quinn, asked me to help her devise a drama series about a criminal psychologist, but determined that the emphasis of the story should rest on why a crime had been committed, rather than simply who had perpetrated it. The engine of the piece was to explore the complexities of the mind, both psychologically and neurologically, within the thriller genre.It was suggested that I "smuggle" in aspects of the end of my marriage to counterpoint and refract upon the murder case Grace was investigating. In portraying her failing marriage, we hoped to imbue the piece with the veracity it needed to distinguish it from the litany of other crime thrillers on television In any event, that was how I justified it.

However, while I was writing the screenplay, I began to perceive that the real issue Grace had to confront was, yet again, that of forgiveness. A character says to her, "If you love someone enough, you can forgive them anything."In the drama, as happened to me in reality, Grace was woken up in the middle of the night when her husband talked in his sleep Their young son was in the same room, as ours was. Grace, like me, was concerned that the boy would wake up and hear his father, so wakes her husband with the ruse that his mistress is on the phone.In the drama, this scene took place in the marital home. In reality, we were staying in a country pub hotel after attending a wedding. There was no phone in the bedroom so I told my husband his mistress was on the phone in the corridor outside. After I confronted him and heard his admission about his affair with a married woman, we had no choice but to return to the hotel room, saying we would discuss it further when we returned home to London.Now this is the bit you really couldn't write.