I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.

The anorexic body is held in the grip of will alone; its meaning is far from stable. What it says - 'Notice me, feed me, mother me' - is not what it means, for such attentions constitute an agonising test of that will, and also threaten to return the body to the dreaded 'normality' it has been such ecstasy to escape.

Society in the English countryside is still strangely, quaintly divided. If black comedy and a certain type of social commentary are what you want, I think English rural communities offer quite a lot of material.

The reaction to 'Aftermath' has been far worse than to 'A Life's Work,' yet I find I'm perhaps a little less touched by it. In both cases, I've coped artistically by believing the criticisms weren't right. They upset me, but they didn't challenge my understanding of how to write, nor of how morality functions in literature.

My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.

The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, she's asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it's her equality that's fake.

The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that ­others are demanding to be given it back - to be "taught" - is disturbing.