The point, of course, is that a marriage is unknowable to anyone outside it (and often to the people in it), so that only the couple themselves know where the lines between autofiction, truth and comedy blur in these retellings. And for me also it’s about the shared nature of feelings – they’re not private, and they shouldn’t be bound up with an ideology of privacy and property. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Why, then, she wonders, has there been so little serious intellectual engagement with the idea of marriage?

Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘Marriage is unknowable to anyone outside it’: Devorah Baum and husband Josh Appignanesi with their children in 2016.

I was one of the only Jews around and I had a very strong sense of my Jewish identity for that reason. It has often been regarded as the most bourgeois and conservative of institutions, while proving flexible enough to accommodate radical reinventions. If somebody tells you a joke well and fresh, and you get a laugh out of it, that’s a real relief – and it’s a strengthening moment, as well.

And both my books regard that situation as becoming increasingly common to all people who feel themselves the subjects of a globalised world. So, everyone thought he was such a loser… you know, the one good thing that ever happened to the family…. So, the notion – that we had 27 other countries we could go to, and now we don’t – feels absolutely existential for many Jews in this country. JA: But again, not as much as in America – the cool, young, sort of ‘hipster Judaism’ that is huge in America.

I had approached the book with a measure of doubt, wondering whether – being of an age with the author but never married – I would find myself excluded from its thesis.