I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.

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.

I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things.

Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.

Leaving things behind and starting again is a way of coping with difficulties. I learnt very early in my life that I was able to leave a place and still remain myself.

Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.