Not long after my forty-second birthday, my ex husband puts his arm through mine and tells me about a 21-year-old Brazilian girl he is planning to make his girlfriend. The divorce had finally come through and I was in LA bringing our daughter, CJ, to visit him from London, where she and I now lived. Things had become friendly enough to catch a movie together – just the two of us.

Walking the graffitied Eastside pavements before the film starts, he explains his plan to ‘clear the deck’ of other girls, as he had once ‘cleared the decks’ for me. Paula is young, he says, too young (he shakes his head). He wishes she wasn’t twenty one. Having started my writing career as a columnist on a national newspaper when I was a teenager, I feel protective of the very young. Ben feels protective of me, both as I was then and as a result of what I was then, since he, too (via the medium of Australian coming of age films) was out in the world too early. He also knows what it is to have a minor spritz of fame that isn’t worth the cost once the top note of success has burned away. He knows the waiting until middle age to have people pick up on your scent again.

We’re both old enough to remember Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours on vinyl (visceral memories of turning over to the B side, where revelation lives) and young enough that the vinyl was handed down from our mothers. We both have early childhood memories of Abba, though they’re different: his a recurring dream of discovering his parents – who were in the midst of a bitter divorce – happily in bed with the four band members. Mine a suspicion, garnered from their videos, that the cheerful bearded men were holding the stricken looking women against their will.

Book of the week: read an extract from Busy Being Free by Emma Forrest