The narrator, known to us only as Mrs Armitage, recounts to the reader the collapse of her fourth marriage, after thirteen years, to her unfaithful husband. This writing feels exceedingly modern, and Mortimer's honest and heartbreaking dissection of women's loss of identity, or failure to secure one, in the wake of marriage and motherhood is wonderfully raw as it is bleak. She writes of women's role in sex in a reality so often overlooked - the narrator's many children being used as a vice, to give her a purpose she does not know if she wants, and to make sex something that is not painful for her. I just love reading women's writing about women, about their weaknesses that are not their own, their failures that they blame themselves for, their relationships that they destroy themselves in.

Dear Mrs Evans, for God's sake teach me how to live. It's not that I've forgotten. It's that I never knew.[...] When we were young we said to hell with it and used our breasts as shields. But the tears fall so when they take away love. Be a man, Mrs Evans. It's all that's left for you. 'What's this?' Jake said. He glanced at the letter, taking it from me. It drifted into the wastepaper basket.[...]While he held me, I kept an eye on it; it contained the only evidence I had in the world that I was not alone.