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.

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.

Having your second child, in case you were wondering, is a lot harder than having your first, except for those people who find it easier. I'm afraid I don't have the latest figures to confirm this.

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

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

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

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