It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

You can put it another way, of course; you always can.

Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior.

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.

It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'.