Under no circumstances must you be permanently glad in the mode of Pollyanna who was a dim wit. Permanent gladness is unnatural and foolhardy. Permanently glad people who are always looking on the bright side will not only one day be arrested, they will be caught off guard by people knifing them in the back and by the small print in loan documents.

Look on the bright side by all means, but look even longer and harder at the seamy side. There is positively no one to blame but yourself if schemes and dreams collapse owing to your own failure to take everything into account, I draw your attention to a troubling incident from my own life.

An incident from my own life
My first novel was about a girl who grew a penis and I wrote it during my third pregnancy. I don’t know why. Linda, a few blocks down the road with the daughter your age who moved to America, typed it up for me and she liked it. I didn’t know what to make of it. I was pregnant. But my agent at the time adored it. She said it was a work of genius and the find of her career. Maybe she was pregnant too.

The agent was so confident that she came round one evening to talk to your father and me about how we would deal with the success she was certain would hit us like a whirlwind. I couldn’t think of a title but she said it didn’t matter. It had everything going for it and she was going to auction it. So your father and I sat back and waited to be covered in glory.

She sent the book out to selected publishers and the selected publishers, appalled at her shamelessness, sent it back. It was a total wash-out. I immediately leaked rhesus negative blood into the baby’s rhesus positive blood and thought I’d never write again. But the baby survived and so did I.

What I learnt was correct thinking for dreams and schemes. Hope for everything but expect nothing. It is a balanced outlook that goes hand in hand with a sense of proportion.

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