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

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion - everything's great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it? Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel.

The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that ­others are demanding to be given it back - to be "taught" - is disturbing.

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

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.

It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.