But there are some wounds that can never be healed.

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.

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.

Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.

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

I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.