You could time a suburban story by your watch: it lasts as long as it takes a small furry animal that's lonely to find friends, or a small furry animal that's lost to find its parents; it lasts as long as a quick avowal of love; it lasts precisely as long as the average parent is disposed on a Tuesday night to spend reading aloud to children.

It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiasticall y they drive you to your own destruction.

How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?

I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction.

A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.

I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.