Good Material: THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER, FROM THE AUTHOR OF EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LOVE

I held her and rocked her gently and she wept and wept and wept. And I was reminded that you should really want to have a baby if you’re going to have a baby.

‘Thirty-five is the youth of middle age,’

‘Okay, well, do you know who’s going to be the talk of the mum WhatsApp groups tonight? Do you know who’s going to get slagged off for being a plastic sugar parent?’ she asks, faintly demonically, as she opens a pack of the party bag sweets and starts chomping at them. ‘It ain’t you, Avi. It never is.’

He drank and smoked too much, he had no money, he had the neuroses of a beta male and the know-it-all confidence of an alpha male.

‘Getting dumped is never really about getting dumped.’ ‘What is it about, then?’ I ask. ‘It’s about every rejection you’ve ever experienced in your entire life.

love what a good friend you are. You’re really engaged with the lives of the people you love. You organize lovely experiences for them. You make an effort with them, you’re patient with them, even when they’re sidetracked by their children and can’t prioritize you in the way you prioritize them.

Hadn’t I just turned twenty-one? Hadn’t I just left university? Hadn’t my life only just begun? I couldn’t fathom how I had got here so quickly and how I could be expected to make such enormous decisions while I still felt so young. How had this happened?

of

I’m a balding, failed comedian with no savings who lodges with a seventy-eight-year-old tinned soup collector.