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

Andy’s friend Jon and his girlfriend went travelling for a month and we agreed to look after their cat, called Doris. I changed Doris’s litter, I fed her, I gave her her medicine, I played with her when she yowled. Andy did nothing but stroke her when she sat next to him on the sofa.

Closer to fifty than twenty.

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

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.

‘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

realized that my mum and dad had met at university, had both obtained degrees, and yet my mum had not had a job since she married my dad.

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’.

Where I can be in the company of my teenage self and he can remind me of something about hope and youth and what it is to know you have things ahead of you that are new.

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.