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But when you talk of not wanting children, it is impossible to avoid sounding defensive, like you’re trying to prove the questionable beauty of a selfish and too-tidy existence. It is hard to come across as anything other than brittle, rigid, controlling, against life itself. Anyway, I resented having to explain myself at all, to open a hatch over my heart because a near stranger asked an impertinent question.

So much of being a grown-up is about managing or quelling desires. For food, for drink, for sex, for good times; if you’re a woman, I maintain, for ambition. You should not want too much. It is strange, then, to be in a position where society demands you should have an appetite for something. And yet here was a rare instance where I was appetite-free, and the world seemed to be saying, “You have to want this thing,

Scientists say that our pupils flare when they register something of interest; for women, babies top the list. (Porn follows.) But my pupils and my hypothalamus, the seat of desire, did not seem to be communicating. There was no corresponding baby hunger, at least not in that ready place where all my other hungers were shouting for attention. Meanwhile, there had been a societal swing back to the orthodoxy of