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There is a photograph I have kept of my mother in her late twenties. She is sitting on a rock at a picnic with friends. Her hair is wet because she’s just had a swim. There is a kind of introspection in her expression that I now relate to the very best of her. I can see that she is close to herself…

Marguerite Duras did not have the ‘fatal patience’ that de Beauvoir rightly thought women who were mothers had learned to their detriment. After Duras wrote Lol Stein, she made a curious remark – she said that she gave herself permission to speak ‘in a sense totally alien to women’. I know what she…

And what about the men who, like Algren, wanted home, children and love? In my Boston hotel, I had glimpsed a man sitting with his female companion at a café table overlooking the harbour. He was in love with her, attentive and gentle and kind. She had taken off her sandals and jacket and sunglasse…

Simone de Beauvoir knew that a life without love was a waste of time. Her enduring love for Sartre seems to have been contingent on her living in hotels and not making a home with him, which in the 1950s was more radical than I believe even she realized. She remained committed to Sartre being the e…

To separate from love is to live a risk-free life. What’s the point of that sort of life? As I wheeled my electric bike through the park on the way to my writing shed, my hands had turned blue from the cold. I had given up wearing gloves because I was always grappling in the dark for keys. I stoppe…