When it came down to it, he just wasn't that engaged. You had to be engaged to be a vegetarian; you had to be engaged to sing "Both Sides Now" with your eyes closed; when it came down to it, you had to be engaged to be a mother.

It takes a child to say the unsayable.

He would read up on parenting, if he thought it would help, but his errors always seemed too basic for the manuals. "Always tell your kids they have siblings..." He couldn't imagine any child-raising guru taking the trouble to write that down. Maybe there was a gap in the market.

He'd told her it was just a scratch and got cross when she hadn't offered morphine.

Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.

It's no wonder we're all such a mess, is it? We're like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it.

I burst into tears and I cry and cry until it feels as though it is not salt and water being squeezed from my eyes, but blood.