Women, in all fields - whether mothers or not - still encounter an extraordinary number of obstacles. They have to hold too many things together and often sacrifice their aspirations in the name of affections.

I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic - if we can call it that - between high and low. Maybe it's because I was not born or brought up in affluence.

Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.

I no longer protect myself from the world I grew up in. Rather, today I try to protect the feelings I have for that world, the emotional space where my desire to write first took hold, and still grows.

Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.

Those who write need that "willing suspension of disbelief ", as Coleridge called it.

I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.