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

Andy and I lived separate lives as I prepared for the interview and presentation, and he filmed Ask or Task. I made him dinner when he came home. I’d run his lines with him before bed.

realized that my mum and dad had met at university, had both obtained degrees, and yet my mum had not had a job since she married my dad.

realized: I don’t think I’m cut out to support a male artist. And I’m certainly not cut out to have a family with one.

And their scattering has an air of deliberate ritual, ancient and necessary.

Symbolism is good for a story but bad for a party.

And I realized that their concept of teamwork in parenting was that my mum was left for weeks at a time to raise us as if she were a single mother while she boasted that her husband was working in ‘the Far East’.

likes. Why are you allowed to do that and I’m not allowed to make generalizations about women? I’d bellow. WHY? And then I would be met with a convoluted barrage about the pay gap and illegal abortions and FGM and the biological clock and childcare systems and the fact that every three days in this country a woman is killed by a man.

‘But do I ever think about what my life would have been like had I been brave enough to not become a mother? Had I been brave enough to even imagine what that life could have been like?’

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?