Jen snorts. ‘Oh, love, I’m sorry, you’re in a bad way if you’re expecting Sam Strong to feign an interest in any aspect of your life where you keep your knickers on. Look, why do you think I’m so miserable about this? It’s because it’s so exciting! It’s because you’ve tried so hard and worked so hard. You’re going to be a huge, huge success. And I will be an English teacher, living with my mum, inspiring fresh generations of young women to become journalists until my resentment and frustration move me to violence, and I get struck off.’

What can I say? How do I comfort her? ‘The odds are never in our favour, and if they favoured me, they could favour you too. It’s really hard for girls like us.’ Because girls like us don’t get to be writers. We read, sure. We’re quiet, we’re studious, and if we’re really lucky, we encounter an encouraging teacher and discover that we love to invent stories just as much as we love to hear them. We might rise through the ranks of the school newspaper, or sometimes we meet someone more confident than us, or more comfortable in their ambition, who is putting together a student blog, a fanzine, a journal, and they want gig reviews or recipes or poems. We write, and write, and frustrate ourselves because we cannot find words accurate enough to explain why the writing itself is nourishing us, why this is the first thing we have ever done that fits around our fractured understanding of who we are. Because in writing, we are able to lose ourselves, and then find ourselves again. The work is nourishing, it drains but then restores more than it has taken. We think ‘my heart is singing when I do this’ and we mean it. We build our own foundations. Then, others come to build their walls.

It’s a nice hobby, isn’t it? But not a proper job. Something for your spare time. Something that, if you’re any good at it you’ll still really want to do when you’ve staggered off the bus at the end of your fourteen-hour day, and your eyeballs ache, and your feet are bleeding. Something that you have to earn the right to want. Something you have to earn the right to do, in shift work at eight pounds an hour, shoes sticky with ink, or glue, or generic cola syrup, anyone’s ‘darling’, then anyone’s ‘stuck-up cunt’, measuring your life in two-minute toilet breaks, always smiling, always tired, so tired, coming to in the shower in the morning and wondering whether it was all a bad dream.