When I moved out of London 13 years ago, I found a...

I am firmly of the opinion that women who make a lot of effort to hang onto their looks in middle age (unless they are beauties, entertainers or prostitutes) are rather sad, as one should surely have something more substantial to recommend one by this time, such as kindness or cleverness.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.

As a child, I wanted only two things - to be left alone to read my library books, and to get away from my provincial hometown and go to London to be a writer. And I always knew that when I got there, I wanted to make loads of money.

My dad encouraged us to fail. Growing up, he would ask us what we failed at that week. If we didn't have something, he would be disappointed. It changed my mindset at an early age that failure is not the outcome, failure is not trying. Don't be afraid to fail.

I was a mixture of being incredibly old for my age and incredibly backwards. I was born quite old, but then I stopped growing. I lived with my mum and dad till I was 30.

You get to a certain age and you can't judge yourself on your dad or your parents.

If you love somebody, you love them. My parents had a 25-year age gap between them and my mum was the breadwinner, my dad the house husband. I'm a strong believer that a good relationship can work, whatever the situation.