He has found himself more and more reliant on her at exactly the point that she has become less available to him.

Welcome to the graveyard of ambition.

She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.

For some time now she has had the conviction that life is about to change if only because it must. . . .

Well, I don't think Hollywood's a dirty word at all, I love a lot of Hollywood films.

She used to pride herself on her refusal to see two sides of an argument, but increasingly she accepts that issues are more ambiguous and complicated than she once thought.

My 20s was a sea of worry. I worried about benefit forms, about being thrown out of my flat. I never went on holiday because I thought: 'What if an audition comes up?' I was a nervous wreck.