In the next room is a slightly dirty, completely exhausted two-year old who ran himself ragged in Kew Gardens and fell fast asleep in the pushchair on the way home. He’s beautiful, spirited, energetic and I have to write quickly while he’s sleeping, but having Solly is the most wonderful thing in the world.

My second dream was to be published. My book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, a biography of Grayson Perry, the transvestite potter who won the Turner Prize in 2002, had good reviews and is selling well. And now I’m writing another biography, of Martin Parr, the photographer.

When I was in my twenties, a friend in her thirties said to me, "I wasted my twenties." I found that a shocking and memorable sentence. How could you waste ten years of your life, especially when you hadn’t been alive that long? But now, at the end of my thirties, I too, see that I wasted my twenties, not in a fug of drugs or in the stupidity of beer, but rather just by being lost. Or not even being lost, just not knowing how to get to where I wanted to go. I knew my destination: I wanted to be happily married with children, and work as a writer. But how on God’s earth did you manifest that?

At 24, my boyfriend of seven years left me for someone else; it took me most of the rest of my twenties to recover. My early thirties I spent trying, but failing, to trust and love a selection of men. I did fall hook line and sinker for a man who took me around Uganda, but he fell for someone else. I spent five years not even having sex, never mind being married and having children.

Then writing. At 34, I sat down and thought hard: I’d written thirty-six books, one of which had taken seven years, and none of them were published. I held onto Beckett: "Fail, fail again, fail better." I had an MA in writing from the University of East Anglia and it seemed that every one I knew was getting published, but my books remained resolutely part of the 98 per cent of manuscripts that get rejected.

So, out of complete desperation I set up a publishing group. Jane, Clare and I met at seven o’clock every Wednesday and each talked for thirty minutes about anything and everything that was in the way of us getting published. We shared work, and we shared burdens, we grew close and we gave each other encouragement, advice and feedback. We were serious about getting published and so we dressed professionally for our meetings, even though we were sitting on a collapsed sofa in a tatty, rented flat.

I had an instinct that what I needed most was support and that the reason a lot of women writers don’t get published isn’t for want of talent, but because of emotional blocks and lack of support. So week-by-week, we gave each other confidence, we measured each other’s excesses, we prevented each other from self-sabotaging, and we wouldn’t – absolutely wouldn’t – let each other give up.

After three years of commitment to the publishing group, to ourselves, and to each other, it worked. At 35, and ten weeks pregnant, I got an agent, Then, when my baby was ten weeks old, I got a book deal. I had learned that intelligent persistence works.

In my twenties I sensed that the best way to be happy was to make my dreams come true. In my thirties, being a writer and having a baby has brought me a quality of joy, excitement and fulfilment that I could only guess at when I was younger. And my third dream, of being happily married? I’m working on it!

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