That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.

But what else can we do when we're so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; it is any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery?

I'd stay there, or not, and I'd eat, or not, and I'd drink, or not, and go home, or not, and what I did or didn't do wouldn't matter to anyone at all. And I walked for most of the day. Do people get sad on holiday sometimes? I can imagine they do, having all that time to think.

In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!

The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point.

Women who disapprove of men - and there's plenty to disapprove of - should remember how we started out, and how far we had to travel.

When you're unhappy, I guess everything in the world - reading, eating, sleeping - has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.