"A combination of a desire to communicate, and a passionate belief in the power of story to build up relationships, to shape us. People-watching. But also being aware of situations that are currently preoccupying people. Codes of conduct change, but what the human heart wants really doesn’t."

“For all that somebody gets dumped every nanosecond in the world, you don’t want to be lumped in with everybody else – you want it to be expressed as poignantly and vividly as you feel it yourself…A cliche is only a cliche if it’s happening in someone else’s life.”

“What I’m trying to do in all these novels is mirror a contemporary preoccupation. I’m not providing any solutions. I’m simply saying: ‘Can we please get the conversation going?’”

“I wanted to write a novel about the sandwich generation: parents falling to pieces at one end of your life and children being quite demanding at the other. You, the woman, are probably working full-time, but society, which is really very old-fashioned, still expects women to do all the caring.”