I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

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

I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.

A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.

The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction.

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 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.