Barbara Amiel: My memoir has cost me my best friends

The only female writers of importance I have personally met are Margaret Atwood and Joan Didion, both of whom are rather short. That, I realise, is an advantage of sorts. You have less height to lose. Didion is 5ft 1in according to her Wiki entry, and Atwood, a tiny powerhouse, is listed optimistically as 5ft 4in, but that I think is like the Hollywood actors who I know are several inches shorter than listed heights, having stood breathlessly when Robert Redford walked passed me outside Bloomingdale’s in New York City. I mention this because after completing my third book, the first two written over 40 years ago when I was almost 5ft 8in, I am now 5ft 6in. I have lost an inch and a half since going into a three-year lockdown hunched at my desk. Of course, women do tend to settle when passing a certain point in life, but male writers by and large are so much taller.