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How did that early loss change the way you approached love and relationships?

I think sometimes you look for the parts of yourself you’ve lost in a relationship. I was twenty-three when my father died, and it was almost impossible for me to think about anything else. I would wake up in the nig…

It never left me. It is in the small things – like the decision to order the lobster – and the big things – like leaving my job as a columnist at the Guardian after twenty-six years to become an academic. That was entirely informed by that lesson. I thought, I don’t want to die doing this, I want…

When did you begin to see the unexpected gifts that came with your loss?

The next year of university was a struggle and I didn’t think that losing her had taught me anything. It hadn’t yet, because her death didn’t come with instant knowledge; I only knew that it was the most devastating event…

Iris Murdoch once said that ‘love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.’ She’s right – we achieve love by overcoming our narcissism. When, as teens, we begin having relationships, we tend to do so from within our own point of view; we experience our own…

It’s true, of course, that we need friends who we live life closely alongside. But I think there is a case to be made for keeping the more distant friendships ticking along too, even when they remind us of the everyday intimacies that have been lost. Because life takes people from us all the time. …