We were in a great, seething moment in the 1970s. There was a new Labour government and everything seemed full of hope... But, as we got older and we saw how much women's behaviour contributed to what was wrong, we stopped being able to see ourselves purely as.

At the time it seemed like a natural development of my interest in what was going on around me in society.

It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth.

I think some people wished I'd kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I'm doing it completely intellectually.

I like poking my nose into other people's lives.

That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.

But there are some wounds that can never be healed.