I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.

Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.

I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.

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.

Parenthood, like death, is an event for which it is nearly impossible to be prepared. It brings you into a new relationship with the fact of your own existence, a relationship in which one may be rendered helpless.

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

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