“I heard myself say out loud, ‘This can’t be good.’ But it looked good. When she came to, her baby was on the floor next to her. Her friends were concerned but, she wrote, “I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who’d go to the Gobi desert pregnant.” After two days of abdominal discomfort, she ran into the hotel bathroom, crouched on the floor and blacked out from the pain. When she was five months pregnant, she flew to Ulaanbaatar for work. She was about to turn 38: “It felt like making it on to a plane the moment before the gate closes – you can’t help but thrill,” she wrote in her 2013 New Yorker article, Thanksgiving In Mongolia. In 2012, Levy conceived a baby with sperm from a friend, having overcome the reservations she’d long had about parenthood. So after I finished writing it, I thought, ‘Wow, I guess I’d better follow my own advice now.’” The whole schtick of the book is acceptance and surrender. The hardest part was realising that I’d better mean what I say. But Levy, after negotiating her order with the waiter (“Ooh, the cheddar scramble – is that good? But do we have to have the creme fraiche with it? I mean, let’s not”), shrugs off any concerns about self-exposure: “I’m pretty open book-y, you know? I never understood what the big deal is about privacy. This in itself is something of a surprise, because she is not normally a first-person writer. We are just around the corner from Levy’s flat, where she has spent the past year writing a memoir. “But I’m so much less miserable – I’m not even miserable at all. “If we had this conversation five months ago, I would have been in a bad way,” she says, in a lilting voice that often puts an unspoken “Oh my God!” and “Can you believe it?” behind her words. Levy, by contrast, looks calm, happy and healthy, and not just because she has a tan from a recent five-week stay in South Africa. It’s a typical New York scene: weary and winter-pale parents eating scrambled eggs in a trendy restaurant while their sugar-rushed toddlers play on iPads. W hen we meet for brunch on a cold Saturday in February, it has been five years since we last saw each other. But in 2013, I opened the New Yorker and learned that it was not. Levy and I stayed in touch by email, and although her messages became shorter and more distant, I assumed everything was fine, because she was Ari. I left New York in 2012 and, despite my doomy fears, had twins when I was 37.

So I never admitted any of it to Levy, who seemed more likely to eat her own hair than indulge in such uncool, unfeminist thoughts. Panicking about not having a baby? How retrograde. But like a lot of women of my particular generation, I felt ashamed of this. I, by contrast, was lonely and, like generations of single women in their mid-30s before me, starting to panic. “Isn’t she hilarious?” Levy would say after Lucy had said something that wasn’t, actually, all that funny, but I envied them their mutual devotion after almost a decade together. Sometimes Levy’s wife, Lucy, would join us. Usually we’d go out for drinks – cocktails that knocked me sideways, but barely seemed to touch her sides – and from the start she struck me as being just like her writing: laid-back, wise, curious, kind. Heroes rarely live up to your fantasies, but Levy exceeded them.

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