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while she has taken care of daughters all over the world and is hugely revered for her public work and service, my childhood tells a very different story. I came very low down in her priorities  -  after work, political integrity, self-fulfilment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel.

My mother would always do what she wanted  -  for example taking off to Greece for two months in the summer, leaving me with relatives when I was a teenager. Is that independent, or just plain selfish?

When I was beaten up at school  -  accused of being a snob because I had lighter skin than my black classmates  -  I always told my mother that everything was fine, that I had won the fight. I didn't want to worry her.

But the truth was I was very lonely and, with my mother's knowledge, started having sex at 13. I guess it was a relief for my mother as it meant I was less demanding. And she felt that being sexually active was empowering for me because it meant I was in control of my body.

David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day, in which there appears a wonderful story about what it was like for Sedaris to be a gay fifth-grade student at a North Carolina school.

Describing his efforts to hammer out his lisp in the speech therapy lab, Sedaris remembers life thusly: “None of the therapy students were girls. They were all boys like me who kept movie star scrapbooks and made their own curtains. ‘You don’t want to be doing that,’ the men in our families would say. ‘That’s a girl thing.’ Baking scones and cupcakes for the school janitors, watching Guiding Light with our mothers, collecting rose petals for use in a fragrant potpourri: anything worth doing turned out to be a girl thing. In order to enjoy ourselves, we learned to be duplicitous. Our stacks of Cosmopolitan were topped with an unread issue of Boy’s Life or Sports Illustrated, and our decoupage projects were concealed beneath the sporting equipment.”

Sedaris has some painful memories of his childhood — alongside many funny ones. But his is not the usual cri de coeur from someone who considers himself to have been a victim of torment and discrimination. He is an extraordinarily self-aware writer who recognizes that there are very real and permanent differences between the school’s lispers (the “future homosexuals of America,” he calls them — a line no straight man would ever be allowed to write) and the majority of the school’s males, who worship fast cars and professional football; and that these differences cannot be erased or bridged merely with good intentions.

In short, he recognizes that there is a boy’s club, and that he isn’t in it — not in its majority caucus anyway. Better to seize on that sobering realization than wallow in the myth that the world can be brought into one giant gender-free mélange if we all send our children out in feather boas.

Deborah Orr looks at why some women still don’t adopt feminism or call themselves feminists. She starts by saying that there is a myth that women reject feminism simply because it has a bad image. A kind of 80s dyke image. I agree with her point in relation to that myth, that:

‘The very fact that some feminists are so willing to accept that women don’t want the label for such superficial reasons, rather than crediting women with more profound intellectual discomfort, is an indication that even feminist attitudes can sometimes be dismissive of women and their legitimate concerns.’

Orr writes:

‘The fundamental and rather serious problem is the blunt and somewhat stubborn emphasis on “equality“, difficult enough in a society deeply divided by economic inequality generally, even without the added complication that it’s the people with care of children, whatever their sex, whose economic freedom is most compromised the world over.’ (my emphasis)

‘Feminists (and I’m generalising here) tend towards the conclusion that women who don’t sign up are simply hostages to the tyranny of the patriarchy, whose feeble personal consciousnesses have refused to be raised.’

And, her belief that women reject feminism for more complex and thought-out reasons than mere ‘false consciousness’.