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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.