https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/22/it-changed-my-life-edmund-de-waal-on-writing-the-hare-with-amber-eyes

Before writing his bestselling memoir, the potter and author had not realised that losing the thread of a family was so universal

It was difficult. I was making the most complex work of my life: an installation of 450 porcelain vessels for a red aluminium shelf 50m above the entrance to the V&A. It had to be finished and installed on the scaffolding in the same month as the delivery of the final draft of The Hare With Amber Eyes, which follows an inherited collection of very small objects through 150 years of my Jewish family. Both projects had taken years.

My studio in Tulse Hill was tucked away behind chicken shops with a noisy garage next door. And every night I would be writing the last chapters about how close memoir feels to trespass, how to navigate what to say and what to leave unsaid, and trying to check notes on fin de siècle antisemitism or duelling codes in Paris or the weather in Odessa. We were firing the kilns every day. There were stacks of books among the glaze tests.