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

‘Getting dumped is never really about getting dumped.’ ‘What is it about, then?’ I ask. ‘It’s about every rejection you’ve ever experienced in your entire life. It’s about the kids at school who called you names. And the parent who never came back. And the girls who wouldn’t dance with you at the disco. And the school girlfriend who wanted to be si

It is weird to think that this must have been how Jen felt about me at some point, that she had to go through all this without telling me – realizing that I saw a future and she didn’t, trying to find ways of leaving.

I like this easy conversation about our own desires, spoken about as if it’s something different to the date we’re currently on. We talk uninhibitedly – there’s no feelings of jealousy and everything is said and received with good will. The fact of our respective attraction to other people is separate to the fact of our attraction to each other. It

‘I like the idea of keeping a long relationship exciting with non-monogamy. Why cut yourself off from the experience of falling in love over and over and over again?’ ‘Why

Closer to fifty than twenty.

‘I love my son,’ she said. ‘And I don’t say this as his mum, I say it as a woman who’s got twenty-six years on you. Everything you want to do in your life, you can do without a man, Jen.’

‘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?’

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.

My family were surprisingly upset by the news. It turned out that, in my mum’s eyes, a skint comedian who she didn’t like was a better prospect for a nearly thirty-five-year-old woman than no boyfriend at all.