I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.

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

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.

Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in peoples minds with emotion.

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

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.