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

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

But I can't bear it when somebody who some man made a pass at - to call that violence seems to me absurd and insulting to women who've really met violence, who've been raped or bashed.

I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I'm left out.

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

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.

Tentatively I stood a great lump of wood on the chopping block and bought the axe down on it. It flew into two perfect halves. Such was my elation that I ran inside, put on our ancient cracked record of Aretha Franklin singing Respect and danced all by myself for half an hour in our living room, without inhibition, almost crying with jubilation – not just about the wood, but because I could live competently some of the time, and because that day I liked myself.