The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.

Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.

It is shaming sometimes how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum’s sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush?

But how to do feelings? All very well to write "She felt sad", or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things.

How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.

Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?

Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.