Life & Wisdom Quote by Helen Dunmore

Intimacy is Dunmore's chosen instrument, and it doubles as a quiet manifesto. When she says she "concentrate[s] on the lives of individuals", she's refusing the panoramic view that so often turns history, grief, or social change into décor. The verb is telling: concentrate implies both focus and distillation. She’s not interested in capturing everything; she’s interested in compressing experience until it becomes potent enough to transmit feeling.

The real charge sits in that phrase "feel with intimately". Dunmore isn’t promising readers empathy as a moral badge; she’s describing a crafted closeness, engineered on the page. "Feel with" suggests companionship rather than judgment, a refusal to keep characters at a safe interpretive distance. Intimacy here is tactical: it disarms the reader’s tendency to generalize, to turn a person into a type. Once you know someone up close, the easy narratives about victims, heroes, or eras start to wobble.

As a poet, Dunmore brings a lyric sensibility to narrative attention: the belief that a single consciousness, rendered precisely, can carry more political and emotional weight than a thesis statement. Context matters too. Writing in a late-20th/early-21st-century Britain saturated with big public arguments about class, war, austerity, and national memory, she stakes out a counter-method: let the public story enter through the private door. The subtext is a defense of the small-scale as the most honest scale. If the reader "comes to know" someone intimately, they can’t stay clean. They’re implicated.