‘That’s fantastic! This is the one about what beauty is?’ Vee still reads everything Leonie writes. Even when they don’t see each other much, the envelopes come. Vee reads the photocopied typewritten pages, writes Leonie a letter about what she thinks, and posts it back. So she has read this latest of Leonie’s books about why all of women’s thinking about their looks, and their bodies, is wrong. Her friend is passionate about how everyone has got so used to seeing everything from the male perspective that there is almost no way to get away from it. So women who dress in order not to be sexualised are just as oppressed as those who wear pencil skirts and kitten heels, in Leonie’s view: no makeup is as bad as a full face of the stuff because it is a reaction against the way patriarchal society expects women to look. Therefore, it is just as dictated by the way men think women should look. And as for weight, ideas of fat and thin, sexy and overweight-therefore-unsexy – Leonie sees oppression in this, the time it takes to consider food, to decide whether to eat it, to label it ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Ursula, Leonie’s sister, goes to Weight Watchers and is always trying to persuade Leonie to join her. After these conversations, Leonie does an impression of her sister, weighing carrots and writing down calories in a notebook, that makes Vee feel sorry for them both.

Leonie’s outrage, her vision, her fury with the world in which she lives and with her sisters who don’t seem to see what she sees – these things blister the page. But somehow without Leonie there in person to make it all make sense, without her wit and her quick, clever eyes, the words feel like too much, the argument too uncompromising, and Leonie’s advice – to refuse the choices on offer to women, to refute them, to find a new way – doesn’t actually help her when she needs to buy some new trousers.

But Leonie has been told, time and again, that this is why even the readers who want to love her work struggle with it. Even her articles for Spare Rib have been poorly received. Fen had suggested, tentatively, that women might interpret her writing as Leonie telling them how to look instead of the patriarchy dictating to them. The only place where she seems accessible is in her ‘Dear John’ columns for This Month magazine, which began as a three-month trial and have run without a break for more than a decade. Leonie has refused to listen to anyone who has tried to tell her that the tone she adopts in those articles is what will get her message across much more effectively than her more strident writing. She says she doesn’t see why she should sugar the pill.