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.

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.

Modern morality is all about perception.

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

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.

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

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