I went on demonstrations with picket signs from a young age so I admire and grew up in the feminist movement, however I’ve always been critical of its unthinking ideologies. In 1991 I wrote an article for The New York Times, where I compared the language of date rape pamphlets being handed out to college freshmen at the time, to a Victorian guide to conduct for young ladies, and found they were talking about women in the same way – in a way that I felt was condescending. There is this tendency to use politicised language that is too easy or too simple to address some of the more complicated things going on in the world.Feminism wastes too much energy on policing people’s opinions. When the journalist and writer Gay Talese was interviewed recently, he was asked which female writers inspired him and he said he couldn’t think of any. His reply resulted in a Twitter backlash. There is a fascist ugliness to these social media witch-hunts that say you have to think certain things otherwise you are the enemy. Instead we should be focusing on more important issues like equal pay, which I wrote about in The Guardian earlier this year.We live in an ostensibly liberal, ostensibly liberated, ostensibly tolerant culture, but – as my book In Praise of Messy Lives (2012) discussed – this isn’t the case; sometimes our conservatism and puritanism masquerades as something else. For example, we don’t say that something or someone is immoral anymore, instead we use the term health, but there is still the same moral judgement. We are imprisoned by the idea of living a good life.I only really came to understand this when I became a mother. I have two children to two fathers and I have lived the majority of my life outside the institution of marriage. There is a lot of judgement towards single mothers, and although it’s not directly expressed in more liberal, urban settings, you see these books that present being a single mother as something radical. It’s kind of ridiculous when you think about it – why should it be that somebody who doesn’t settle down and get married in their 30s or 40s is this outlier?When I was 12 I developed a type of pneumonia that was resistant to antibiotics and I stopped breathing on the way to the hospital. I was in intensive care for weeks and everyone thought I was going die because – until the doctor removed part of my lung – there didn’t seem to be a solution. Ever since then I’ve been preoccupied with the subject of death. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag wrote about how our appetite for images of people in pain is equal to or greater than our appetite for images of sex. Yet humans have this primal drive to keep the subject of death out of our lives, and modern life makes that possible because it's cordoned off in modern hospitals most of time. For me it’s not a depressing subject to write about, but it’s certainly considered a taboo.I have a feeling there are always celebrity deaths, it's just that we are noticing and thinking about them more as a culture. The recent one that most affected me was David Bowie. In part, because he seemed so much like a figment of his own imagination; with someone so spectacularly self-invented it's almost hard to imagine him ceasing to exist. The confrontation of mundane, real world things like death with such flamboyance seems impossible. I can't imagine his final days. They were probably as drab as anyone else's. The thing I learned from writing The Violet Hour is that your imagination is wrong in these instances. Real deaths are full of surprises.The Violet Hour is published by Virago; www.virago.co.uk