“I used to fear their deaths--the car! the dog! the sea! the germ!--until I realized it need never be a problem: on the trolley, on the way to the mortuary, I would put my hands into their ribs and take their hearts and swallow them, and give birth to them again, so that they would never, ever end.”

“And every book, you find, has its own social group--friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end.”

“I’m going to lie this one right on the line, right here, right now: I’m pro big pants. Strident feminism NEEDS big pants. Really big. I’m currently wearing a pair that could have been used as a fire blanket to put out the Great Fire of London at any point during the first 48 hours or so. They extend from the top of my thigh to my belly button, and effectively double up as a second property that I can escape to at weekends. If I were going to run for parliament, it would be solely on a platform of ‘Get Women In Massive Grundie’s’.”

“But I am, personally, not a gambler. I wouldn’t spend £1 on the lottery, let alone take a punt on a pregnancy. The stakes are far, far too high. I can’t agree with a society that would force me to bet on how much I could love under duress.”

“But, of course, you might be asking yourself, 'Am I a feminist? I might not be. I don't know! I still don't know what it is! I'm too knackered and confused to work it out. That curtain pole really still isn't up! I don't have time to work out if I am a women's libber! There seems to be a lot to it. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?'I understand. So here is the quick way of working out if you're a feminist. Put your hand in your pants.a) Do you have a vagina? andb) Do you want to be in charge of it?If you said 'yes' to both, then congratulations! You're a feminist.”

“But nearly every woman I know has a roughly similar story - in fact, dozens of them: stories about being obsessed with a celebrity, work colleague or someone they vaguely knew for years; living in a parallel world in their head; conjuring up endless plots and scenarios for this thing that never actually happened.”

“As it turned out, almost every notion I had on my 13th birthday about my future turned out to be a total waste of my time. When I thought of myself as an adult, all I could imagine was someone thin, and smooth, and calm, to whom things... happened. Some kind of souped-up princess with a credit card. I didn't have any notion about self-development, or following my interests, or learning big life lessons, or, most important, finding out what I was good at and trying to earn a living from it. I presumed that these were all things that some grown-ups would come along and basically tell me what to do about at some point, and that I really shouldn't worry about them. I didn't worry about what I was going to do. What I did worry about, and thought I should work hard at, was what I should be, instead. I thought all of my efforts should be concentrated on being fabulous, rather than doing fabulous things.”