I absolutely don't dislike children - I would choose their company over adult company any time.

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

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

Leaving things behind and starting again is a way of coping with difficulties. I learnt very early in my life that I was able to leave a place and still remain myself.

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

The 'good' mother, with her fixed smile, her rigidity, her goody-goody outlook, her obsession with unnecessary hygiene, is in fact a fool. It is the 'bad' mother, unafraid of a joke and a glass of wine, richly self-expressive, scornful of suburban values, who is, in reality, good.

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