What can I say about the writing of this book which isn't already in the book itself? In this memoir, I was desperate to convey to the reader how a book is actually made, how the act of writing is also an act of reparation. I wanted to address the reader personally, to make him or her see the artifice of creation, the lie masquerading as truth. It was very freeing, even exhilarating, writing this book because it felt like my life outside the book, my actual life, was collapsing (my body was falling apart, my marriage; my children were still small, babies really, hardly sleeping, they were still young enough to need constant care, and I felt myself to be struggling for existence).

It seemed to me when I started writing that I wanted to be a kind of witness. I couldn't find any books which told me what it felt like to be a mother, and it seemed to me that no book had been written which actually documented the struggle between being a responsible mother and being a fully cognizant, breathing human being. How did anyone manage to be both a mother and a person? Wasn't motherhood about selflessness and my life up until this point about self-creation?

My struggle was simply the struggle writ large of every woman who has ever wanted to do something else as well as being a mother. Writing requires the whole of one's emotional and intellectual attention, in a very intrusive way. Why had so many of the great women writers been childless? What was the cost, creatively, of choosing to have a child?

I wanted to document something of this struggle. I wanted to give a voice to the voiceless, to the thousands and millions of stories of motherhood which had never been told. The only way I could do it was to tell my own story, in all its failures, so that my one small truth might represent something larger. I knew that I had to put everything in how exhausted, sleep deprived mothers, half-mad, raving, can wish foul things upon their own loved children. And how they never dare admit it out loud). I had to make a decision, very early on, about how much I was going to tell: I realized at once that unless I put as much truth in as I could, the book would be worthless.

Of course, now it's done, everybody wants to know whether or not I feel as if my privacy has been invaded, whether I feel like the ancients did who felt like their spirits were being captured when someone took their photo. Well, yes, and no. I certainly don't like it when people I hardly know assume they know everything about me. But I also feel that, paradoxically, A Better Woman presents a kind of false self, or at least a 'public' version of myself and that there is still a large uncharted internal landscape which has remained entirely private.

By this I mean that I knew exactly what I was doing when I was writing and the book was a very self-conscious, writerly act. In other words, I put in exactly what I wanted readers to know, and I feel there is a lot left out.

In a sense, too, the 'I' in the book was as much a creation as the 'I' of a novel. It is me, of course, but it is also only part of me, which is why I don't feel embarrassed or ashamed or even 'brave' to have published it.

I feel a curious detachment from the 'I' in the book, which is perhaps the only way I could release it for publication. Everyone wants to know whether Les and I are back together (yes), how the boys are (Caspar is now five and started school in February, 2001 - the only thing I could get out of him was that his teacher, the gloriously named Ms Springfield, says she is "busting" to go to the toilet instead of "bursting" like Mummy says; Elliot is in four year old kinder, still fond of wrestling and telling me frequently, "Mummy, you're rubbish, but you're lovely").

I have had a couple of hundred letters from readers since the book was first published in 1999, many of them not even mothers themselves, and the great majority of them unscathed by birth. At least half a dozen letters have come from women who have suffered birth traumas similar to mine and I have come to feel as if there is an invisible ring of hands around me, a chorus of women's voices, all talking, at once.

Read an extract from A Better Woman (Aurum Press) here.