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 just got back from visiting my eldest daughter for a couple of days. She lives in the city, and pandemic restrictions have only just lifted enough for me to go and stay, so it was exciting. I took my youngest daughter with me, as the girls are close and I knew it would be fun for them.

My youngest daughter is a teenager, but I am still very much a “mother” to her in the way that I always was. I supervise her homework, cook her meals, drive her to meet her friends, comfort her when she has a…

Demi Lovato — former child actress, teen star, drug addict, and now a recovering alcoholic — revealed recently in her YouTube docuseries (“Dancing with the Devil”) that after her near-fatal overdose in 2018, after recovering and returning to her life, she got back in touch with the dealer who had sold her the drugs that night.

It’s a shocking revelation, and more so because she explains that he had not only sold her the drugs but also taken advantage of her sexually on the night of her overdose, when she had been incapacitated and unable to resist.

And yet after…

One of the first “pandemic life changes” for women I read about last year was the concept of “binning our bras”. From the very first moment that we all started working from home, I read article after piece after tweet extolling the joys of a bra-free existence. Everywhere I turned, it seemed, I found cartoons shouting about the relief of ditching the breast scaffolding.

It wasn’t just my news feed, either. TikTok users (I don’t number among them because I’m over 30) began doing “no bra challenge” dances. A YouGov poll revealed that a fifth of British women began to…

When I met the boy who would become the man who would father my first child, we were both still children ourselves, but instantly I was completely smitten.

I loved him with a ferocity I can only remember because I remember the evidence of it. I remember canceling plans with my friends at the last minute almost every day so that I could pretend to him that I had free time available, even when he had stood me up several times in a row beforehand. I would sit by the phone and gnaw the skin around my fingernails, waiting and…

This morning the Apple News app spiked me with an algorithmically-targeted dart right to the heart. “The Price of Passion!” crowed the headline, above an article in which the acclaimed novelist Isabel Allende “reflects on her reckless choices”.

Her “reckless choices”, as I read on, didn’t seem to be as legion as the subheader implied. …