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

I held her and rocked her gently and she wept and wept and wept. And I was reminded that you should really want to have a baby if you’re going to have a baby.

‘You’re trying to frighten me. This isn’t about empowerment, this is about shame. I can’t believe you think it’s okay to speak to me like this.’ I picked up my handbag.

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.

‘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.’

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

‘Thirty-five is the youth of middle age,’

love what a good friend you are. You’re really engaged with the lives of the people you love. You organize lovely experiences for them. You make an effort with them, you’re patient with them, even when they’re sidetracked by their children and can’t prioritize you in the way you prioritize them.

when you’re living in it, rather than visiting it, you realize it’s really different; that new parents not only aren’t complaining too much, they’re not complaining nearly enough.

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

And I realized that their concept of teamwork in parenting was that my mum was left for weeks at a time to raise us as if she were a single mother while she boasted that her husband was working in ‘the Far East’.