We’d been married for two years and we were away on a mini-break, which was a rare thing in those days because we had very little money. Also, we’d taken our children with us, because they were very small, so it wasn’t exactly a romantic mini-break. But still. We were on holiday. It was a treat.

The deal was this: we would meet some friends for lunch and have a day at the aquarium with the children, and then we would put the children to bed in the hotel and I would stay with them while my husband would go…

Over the past couple of weeks, it has become fairly clear that the Armie Hammer abuse rumors — which include screenshots of his talk of cannibalism fantasies and details of him carving his initials into a woman’s genitalia with a knife — are going absolutely nowhere. (For more on those, see this fab piece by Carrie Wynn).

Hammer has already been dropped like a stone by both his agent and his publicist, and most of us are cynical enough to understand that when that happens to a previously highly bankable star, it’s usually a hand-washing exercise ahead of confirmed, or…

When I was living alone for the summer in which I left my husband (after my messy, all-consuming, entirely regrettable affair), I remained in touch — at first — with my extramarital lover.

This is how that went.

On the night that our affair was discovered, he held my hands tightly and he said to me, looking into my eyes, “Listen to me. This is the horrendous bit. This bit is going to be awful. But we have to stay strong. We win, at the end of this. We WIN. We get each other.”

I sat in front of him…

I recently binge-watched the BBC adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s famous novel, The Pursuit of Love. Published in 1945, it’s widely known to be semi-autobiographical, and tells the story of the Radlett family, an eccentric upper-class English family who live in a crumbling stately home called Alconleigh and have the usual in-jokes and traditions common to posh English families at that time. The TV adaptation is fantastic (and it’s coming to US screens later this year, courtesy of Amazon Prime).

The Pursuit of Love

Both the book and the recent series are narrated by Fanny Logan, a cousin of the Radlett family who spends a…

Right now (I mean right now, as in I’m currently typing with paint in my hair and dark curls of finishing wax under my fingernails), I’m in the process of updating the en-suite bathroom at our house. Usually, I enjoy renovating rooms, but this particular task is one hundred percent chore. I’m only doing it because the shower is approximately 15 years old, we live in a hard water area, and it’s turned into more of a trickle than a torrent. I like a shower, and I’d become completely tired of not having a good one.

So, yes. I’ve known…

It was in April 2020 that I first clicked “publish” on any form of Internet writing in any location at all. I’d been meaning for months, for years, to try to make sense in words of the strange untethered feeling I’d developed in my 30s and the way I’d felt my underlying self slip into something unrecognizable, even as I watched it go and wondered at my own decisions.

Then, in 2020 Covid-19 forced us all indoors, and I thought: right. You’ve got time, now, if nothing else. No excuses.

I started a blog. I then started to promote that…

I’ve known Elanor for decades. We were at school together: she dark, confident, and sassy, me blonde and guileless and always ever so slightly on the outside of things, laughing slightly too late at every joke, picking up on even obvious conversational subtext only later, with a rush of foolish embarrassment.

Like me, she married young. James was older: 27 to her 16 when they met, but none of us questioned that, because it was the 1990s, and words like “consent” and “coercion” were not used in the way that we use them now. Anyway, they were happy. They looked…

In the months that I spent on my own, after cheating on my husband and leaving our home, I could actually feel my personality begin to change by slow degrees.

I was very lonely: that was part of it. I’d thoroughly destroyed all the good stuff in my life, and I barely knew who I was in the wake of that destruction. I did believe, though, that I loved the man with whom I had cheated on my husband. I also believed, like a cliche of a fool, that he loved me. And more to the point, I believe that…