I am a good and interested mother - which has surprised me.

The reaction to 'Aftermath' has been far worse than to 'A Life's Work,' yet I find I'm perhaps a little less touched by it. In both cases, I've coped artistically by believing the criticisms weren't right. They upset me, but they didn't challenge my understanding of how to write, nor of how morality functions in literature.

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

A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

Human beings have a need, generally, to destroy things. The Freudian principle of civilisation is correct. There's always, always a difference between the family image and the reality.

We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.