“She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.”

“Sometimes, when it is going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary.”

“Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell .Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.”

“She sometimes wondered what her twenty-two-year-old self would think of today's Emma Mayhew. Would she consider her self-centered? Compromised? A bourgeois sell-out, with her appetite for home ownership and foreign travel, clothes from Paris and expensive haircuts? Would she find her conventional, with her new surname and hopes for a family life? Maybe, but then the twenty-two-year-old Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgmental. Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all of the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she always needed most.”

“Finally, she loved someone and felt fairly confident that she was loved in return. If someone asked Emma, as they sometimes did at parties, how she and her husband had met, she told them: ‘We grew up together.”

“She had reached a turning point. She no longer believed that a situation could be made better by writing a poem about it.”

“Good God, 'the elusive thing'. She had reached a turning point. She no longer believed that a situation could be made better by writing a poem about it.”