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.

Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.

The British have always made terrible parents.

It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.

Parenthood, like death, is an event for which it is nearly impossible to be prepared. It brings you into a new relationship with the fact of your own existence, a relationship in which one may be rendered helpless.

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

Hope is like one of those orchids that grows around toxic waste: lovely in itself - and an assertion, if you like, of indefatigable good - but a sure sign that something nasty lies underneath.