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

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.

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

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

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

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

It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.