A LITTLE GIVE is out now!! This is the equivalent of announcing it from the roof tops. Two exclamation marks instead of one. A hurrah of caps. Born out of the pandemic, it is a book about dailiness, focused on the home and everything women do in it. It is my most political book to date and I can’t wait for it to find its readers.

A Little Give (2023) completes a trilogy of memoirs exploring midlife that has now been translated into nine languages.  The Middlepause (2016) is an open and open-hearted personal account of the years leading up to turning 50.  I mine the depths my myriad losses– of youth, reproductive life, energy, libido, any taken-for-granted sense of a protracted future – before emerging into light and a new definition of the self.

Insomnia (2018) is an unsettling account of a deeply troubling state of lack and longing. A journey into darkness, it dares to peer into the abyss – the dark night of the soul – tripping through the lucid experiences of being sleepless, from edgy highs to the lightning glimpses insomnia gives us into the complexities of love and the sources of creativity.

A Little Give (2023) is situated in the trenches of domestic life: in housework and caring. It’s about being bogged down in immanence while longing for transcendence. It’s about women’s real lives – richly detailed in a succession of small moments – and their escapist feminist yearnings. It’s about systemic gendered injustice, and about looking beyond the struggle to right it in order to ask where our true humanity lies.

In another life, or so it often seems, I wrote Last Days In Babylon (2007), a family memoir about the Jews of Iraq; Rocket Dreams (2004), which looked at where the dreams that once animated the space age washed up once they fell to Earth; and a book about modern-day end-time cults, Living at the end of the World (1998).  I’ve edited two books of women’s history, Science & Sensibility (1991) and A Question of Identity (1993) and contributed essays to Cultural Babbage (1996),  Zero Gravity (2005) , Trauma (2021) and The Carbon Arc (2025). You can find my essays in Aeon, Granta, and The New Philosopher. 

I’m a consultant editor at Aeon Magazine and a regular tutor of life writing and creative non-fiction at Arvon. With Heather Dyer, Tina Pepler and Anna Barker, I run True North —a collective of writers who work with PhD students and early career academics to find and build narrative content in academic writing. I’ve tutored courses for the Granta Writers Workshop and the Faber Academy. In 2025 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

In between all the editing and teaching I’m at work on a novel.