A few years ago, a maelstrom occurred in my life. There were three large, intensely recalibrating events – the birth of my child, the death of my mother and the breakdown of my marriage. These were so closely aligned it was difficult to process them individually or at once.

Not long afterwards – the universe is ludicrous – I received an invitation to judge the 2017 Man Booker prize. I have done a lot of literary judging; it can become an auxiliary occupation for writers and I enjoy it. But this one is an enormous undertaking. Serious conversations were had about whether it would even be feasible for me, given the time, work and economic pressures I had been placed under, not to mention any personal state. I worried it might be one colossal experience too ruinous. Given life’s dealings, I would have been mad to accept. But I said yes.

I am not a voracious, or even habitual, reader. There are times when I read not at all. During darker periods, words have meant everything. That year, I read every day and every night. It was a tyranny, frequently painful, not because of not-good books, just because of the volume, attention and analysis required. The exercise was the literary equivalent of running ultramarathons.

Luckily, our judging panel had something of a love affair. This is not to say we always agreed, just that the personalities involved were remarkably warm, collaborative, energetic, open and curious about the cultural and artistic sensibilities of each other. If there is anything restorative in the world, it is interacting with empathic, edifying people, being encouraged to depart from the dimensions of previous ways of assessing. And, of course, good books. There are moments – rare but profound – when beautifully expressed words offer enough companionability that human beings, and being human, begin to make sense.

While reading, I was grieving, mothering and gently reconsidering romance. Mostly, I was just in it, attending to the duty. I came out of the experience utterly exhausted, feeling like I had a metaphysical flu. Plus, I needed reading glasses. But I also felt truly exercised. I had been in a room with extraordinary, joyful thinkers, sharing an inquiry into what the relationship between words and truth and the meaning of humanity is.

There were long, quiet weeks afterwards of going nowhere near a book. Previous judges had warned me about this aversion, with a particular look in their eyes, a kind of post-traumatic stun. The thought of reading anything ever again made me nauseous. Then I was given a collection of short stories in translation by the Turkish author Sait Faik Abasıyanık, who died in 1954. Abasıyanık, I was told, means approximately “burnt woollen coat”, which sounded much like I had been feeling. Short stories seemed a manageable proposition after lots and lots of very big novels.

And there they were – small, ordinary, luminous and somehow convalescent stories from another time, another country, by an author who seemed to understand the binary torments and celebrations of life, and the orphaned spirit. I read one story a day, a bit like taking a vitamin. Some were barely four pages long. Before I started the last story, I put the collection down, knowing this was a book I did not want to finish. The Abasıyanık certainly wasn’t a cure for anything – I still flinch when I hear a book thudding on to the doormat, and that difficult period of loss and adjustment has been written into me. But some gifts and some books are like a tonic and begin a process of recovery, after whichever glorious trauma.

Madame Zero by Sarah Hall is out now

• Read more stories of change in the G2 special issue A new start on 31 December