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.

Human beings have a need, generally, to destroy things. The Freudian principle of civilisation is correct. There's always, always a difference between the family image and the reality.

An eating disorder epidemic suggests that love and disgust are being jointly marketed, as it were; that wherever the proposition might first have come from, the unacceptability of the female body has been disseminated culturally.

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

To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born - and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.

We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.