IT WAS JANUARY 1995 when my father showed me how to lay a Gypsy curse. I had just published my first novel, Crazy Paving, and I happened to be spending a weekend at home in the East Midlands bungalow where I had been raised and where my parents still lived. On the Saturday morning, my father walked into the kitchen holding a newspaper and said, sympathetically but with an unmistakable hint of relish, ‘You’ve had your first bad review.’ He put it down in front of me.

There it was in The Times. ‘Playwright, critic, journalist, Louise Doughty is a woman of many talents…’ it began. I knew a ‘but’ was coming. The ‘but’ turned out to be the rest of the review.