On a plane, watching a movie.

After the initial travel ban debacle, I wept with joy at all the good people who came out against this fascistic edict.

Last Monday was a really emotional day for me: my last son graduated from high school and he’s going on a mission for the Mormon Church soon. I’ve already experienced it four times with my other sons: my oldest went to London, my second son to Italy, my third to Scotland and my fourth the Netherlands. They come back, but the little boy stays out there. He never comes back.

I cried after I won the Booker.

I wouldn’t change anything. When I was 29, my first husband died, so I learned a new way of thinking about life, which is: there are many things that you can’t control.

My mum, for the way that she brought up her three children and managed to make her money work. She worked as a cleaner for all these families we went to church with. She would cycle there with my little sister on the back of her bike – we didn’t have a car. She had an amazing mind for planning and organising so that we got to do ballet, we went to Brownies.

I worked in a cafe, which I loved, but when it was quiet we had to scrape the fat out from between the tiles on the floor with a butter knife.

My mum looks after our kids all the time, but on the very few weeks she takes time off, doing it all is a big juggle. My mum is a combination of Mary Poppins and Angela Davis, so I’d clone her.

I remember being a teenager and writing this romantic short story in the style of the Brontës on a computer and I didn’t realise that the person whose computer it was could just print it out. A group of boys had a couple of pages and they were all reading it.

I’m not really ashamed, but I haven’t read Lord of the Rings.