I’d always wanted to be around clever people, to be playful with other clever people. My first husband had been involved with a radical theater group that was quite important in Melbourne, and I’d been involved in the feminist arm of it, although I was always a bit of a tourist in that world. But then he was out at night a lot, and I was home holding down the fort with my daughter, and I started to get lonely and sad.

My mother’s life, the life of a married woman with children, had never really appealed to me. It had dawned on me when I was quite young that my mother could never go out for more than about three hours at a time. She always had to be there at lunchtime, at dinnertime. I’d grown up as the eldest child in a family of five girls and one boy, and everybody was always squabbling and looking at the others to see if they were getting more—­counting the strawberries in one another’s bowls. I remember it hitting me when I was about fourteen that our mother was in a sort of cage.