Good Material: THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER, FROM THE AUTHOR OF EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LOVE

‘Okay, well, do you know who’s going to be the talk of the mum WhatsApp groups tonight? Do you know who’s going to get slagged off for being a plastic sugar parent?’ she asks, faintly demonically, as she opens a pack of the party bag sweets and starts chomping at them. ‘It ain’t you, Avi. It never is.’

up a lot at around the two-year mark. Andy had always told me he wanted a family; I’d always told him I wasn’t sure. Seeing as he was the one who wouldn’t have to carry a baby, or birth or nurse a baby, we agreed we would revisit the subject every year or so but otherwise try to stay present in our relationship and not talk too much about the futur

‘But do I ever think about what my life would have been like had I been brave enough to not become a mother? Had I been brave enough to even imagine what that life could have been like?’

Symbolism is good for a story but bad for a party.

He drank and smoked too much, he had no money, he had the neuroses of a beta male and the know-it-all confidence of an alpha male.

Andy kept telling me that no one is ever ready to have a baby and that it will always feel terrifying. The more he said this, the more resentful I became. The risk felt so much higher for me and it wasn’t something he would ever truly acknowledge.

I’m a balding, failed comedian with no savings who lodges with a seventy-eight-year-old tinned soup collector.

realized: I don’t think I’m cut out to support a male artist. And I’m certainly not cut out to have a family with one.

anguished expression and her tone of judgement and her statistics that were meant to terrify me into handing over all my bank details and filling out a form. And I felt rage like I’d never felt before.

Has a distorted view of how everyone else sees him because of his low self-esteem but also because he likes wallowing.