What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?

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

I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.

I was aware, in those early days of motherhood, that my behaviour was strange to the people who knew me well. It was as though I had been brainwashed, taken over by a cult religion. And yet this cult, motherhood, was not a place where I could actually live. Like any cult, it demanded a complete surrender of identity to belong to it.

The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, she's asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it's her equality that's fake.

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.

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