She almost bounds into the room, this dowager duchess of American rock, fresh from whooping it up for Mojo's photographer on the street outside manager Peter Asher's West Hollywood offices. Where lesser mortals would have been wiped out by the session, she seems to have found it positively rejuvenating.

After this exuberant entrance however, Joni Mitchell plunks herself down at the substantial oak table and proceeds to fire up the first of the many cigarettes she will have on the go through the course of our conversation. I 'd heard whisperings that she was seriously ill, possibly even dying of lung cancer; if there's any truth to them they've made little difference to her prodigious intake of nicotine.

She's just released Turbulent Indigo, the seventeenth album in a career that surely stands as one of the most distinguished (and diverse) in the whole rock canon. As Mojo reviewer Charlotte Grieg pointed out last month, it's been a very long journey from Blue (1971) to Indigo - the indigo of the tormented Vincent Van Gogh, a Mitchell pastiche of whose famous self-portrait sans ear graces the album's cover. But the woman is still making music of great authority, still writing songs full of beguiling beauty and trenchant indignation. If occasionally she oversteps the mark and strays into the self-righteousness that made early champion David Crosby say she was "as humble as Mussolini", the best of the album's songs - Sunny Sunday, Sex Kills, The Magdalene Laundries, Not To Blame, The Sire of Sorrow—rank with the most compelling and compassionate musical statements ever made about the things human beings do to themselves and to each other.

Recorded at her Bel Air home with her husband Larry Klein—from whom, in rather typical Mitchell style, she separated the day before the sessions for the album began - Turbulent Indigo was, for a moment at least, conceived as a virtual swansong to her entire career. Released on Reprise, the label to which she was first signed back in 1967, it is an even sparser affair than her last album, Night Ride Home. It also boasts fewer of the guests to which we became accustomed with her '80s records: only guitarist Bill Dillon, sax god Wayne Shorter and backing vocalist Seal (on a cover of James Brown's How Do You Stop?) got the call this time... The album finishes with The Sire of Sorrow Job's Sad Song), an astonishing distillation of The Book of Job which literally raised the hairs on the back of my neck the first time I heard it...

Barney: Sire of Sorrow must be one of the most harrowing things you've ever recorded.

Joni: Well, in a lifetime, I think everyone sinks to the pits, and without that you don't really have powers of empathy. You may have powers of sympathy, but if you've been to the bottom you have an opportunity to be a more compassionate person. I have had a difficult life, as most people have - no more difficult than anyone else's but peculiarly difficult all the same. A life of very good luck and very bad luck, with a lot of health problems and therefore a lot of conduct with medical carelessness. But I don't think I've ever become faithless; I've never been an atheist, although I can't say what orthodoxy I belong to. Many of the themes and images on this album have been with me for a long time, but it wasn't until now that I was cheerful enough to tackle The Book of Job.

The line about spitting out bitterness made me remember things you said at the time of Blue about perceiving that you had a lot of hate in your heart.

Oh yeah, you've got to cleanse yourself. Krishnamurti said an interesting thing, which was that the man who hates his boss hates his wife, and I think that's true. If you're holding dark feelings about anyone, they carry over into your relationship; you burden them with your bitterness. The '80s were very difficult for me, physically and emotionally. A lot of financial betrayal, a lot of health problems. My housekeeper sued in a version of the new palimony; simultaneously I was butchered by a dentist. I don't want to get into the 'poor me' syndrome, but the '80s for me were like being a prisoner of war, what with the physical and mental pain and general climate of mistrust.

Have the '90s been better so far?

Oh yeah. Even the yuppies seem to have noticed that goodies only make you so happy! All human relationships are so malformed at this point, especially heterosexual relationships. Every other woman is raped in her lifetime, and generally if she's raped once she's raped many times because it's by a man who has repeated access to her, either a father or a brother or a priest. And if she's raped as a child she will not be a well-formed adult woman. You have to wonder why it is that men are so frustrated that they're besting on women, and feel they have the license to do so. Contemporary music is full of woman hatred. Rap grew out of the pimp tradition: "My bitch is badder than yours."

There does seem to be a new note of compassion for your sex sounded on this record, particularly on Not To Blame and The Magdelene Laundries.

I've never been a feminist - I've always been a tomboy, a companion to men - but as I get older I have more women friends. Also, things between men and women have gotten so out of line in America. Wife-battering is now a national pastime. As regards Not To Blame, we don't know if O.J. Simpson killed his wife but we do know that he battered her frequently and was kind of smug about it, like he was above the law. So the precariousness of my gender at this particular time was something that was hard for me to sidestep. Precariousness in the office, in the streets, even in public swimming pools, which I talk about on Sex Kills.

That song takes one back to the rage and despair of Dog Eat Dog.

Yes, but no one was ready for that at the time. They were all into ra-ra-Ronnie Reagan, whereas I was one of 12 artists in the state who had 85 percent of our income taxed in a kind of experimental levy. Maybe the greed of that decade was supposed to descend on me more heavily, or more irrationally, than on other people. But I did feel like Alice with the Red Queen; I felt I was in a world where irrational law was coming at me from all directions.

There's a new huskiness and vulnerability to your voice on his record.

I'm finally developing enough character in my voice, I think, to play the roles I write for myself. A song like Cold Blue Steel And Sweet Fire [from For The Roses] should have been sung by a man, but I think I could probably sing it better now. That was a song about the seduction of heroin, which I never did but which I was around. There are other songs in which I think I was miscast, songs I performed as an ingenue - even Both Sides Now, which I wrote when I was 21 and which I think is better sung by a person in their fifties or sixties reflecting back on their life.

Sinatra did it, didn't he?

Poor Frank, though, they gave him this folk-pop arrangement that was all wrong for him. I would love for him to have been able to really stretch out and sing the song.

You sang Woodstock at the Edmonton Folk Festival. What were your thoughts about Woodstock?

Oh, the whole thing was just silly.

That's it?

Uh Huh.

You said before the Edmonton festival that you didn't want people to use you as "a sentimental journey". Have you always tried to resist the nostalgia of your fans?

I understand how peoples memories - particularly of their youth and their best years—are wrapped up with the music they listened to then. They also tend to listen to music less and less as they get older. But I'm a maker of music, and I have a painter’s spirit even more than a musician's, and I like to keep moving forward. I don't like to get stuck in regurgitative situations. I don't won’t to become a "duty player", as Miles Davis would have said.

What did you feel about, say, The Eagles' so-called 'Greed' tour?

I don't know, it's hard for me to imagine a 'Greed' tour. People think we make a lot of money out there, but they forget that the artist is the last to get paid. By the time you've paid all the people who have a piece of you, there isn't a lot left. Unless you get some kind of sponsorship. And who's gonna sponsor me apart from tobacco companies, right?

John Martyn says the problem with folk was that it didn't 'swing'. When you look back on the folkie days, would you agree with that?

Yes, but you have to remember that I was born in a swing era. When I got my legs back after I had polio, I rock'n'roll-danced my way through my teens. My music was always very rhythmic, it just had no drums. But as I began to write my first songs, they were quite intricate and classical, so they went back to my first roots, which were classical. My friends who only knew me as a party doll thought, ‘What is this and where is it coming from?’ My music started off as folk music because that was a good place to get in on the guitar, but then it got more Celtic, and even like German seder when I added the piano. Only then did it really begin to swing. Sometimes it takes a long time for your influences to show up.

Do you ever look on songs such as The Circle Game and think, God, how maidenly and virginal that girl sounds now?

I sang Circle Game as an encore in Edmonton, but I usually try to avoid it. What I realise now is that songs like Circle Game and Big Yellow Taxi have almost become nursery rhymes, they've become part of the culture. I didn't write Circle Game as a children's song, but I'm very pleased to see it go into the culture in that way. Anyway, I'll sing those songs, but I'm more tempted to run by the songs that no one ever seemed to notice. Moon At The Window was one I did in Edmonton, and it was very well received, despite the fact no one noticed it on Wild Things Run Fast.

The conflict between the temptation of fame and 'the fear of the crowd was a preoccupation of yours through the '70s. When did it stop troubling you?

At the time of For The Roses I was really mad at show business. I realise now that I'd entered into show business with a bad idea of what it was about. To give you some idea of how I saw show business, I wrote a poem when I was 16 called The Fishbowl, based on my perception of what the press were doing to Sandra Dee and James Darren at a time when they were having marital difficulties. It went like this:

The fishbowl is a world reversed
Where fishermen with hooks
That dangle from the bottom up
Reel down their catch on gilded bait
Without a fight.

Pike, pickerel, bass, the common fish
Ogle through distorting glass,
See only glitter, glamour, gaiety,
Lunge towards the bait
And miss and weep for fortune's loss.

Envy the goldfish? Why?
His bubbles breaking round the rim
While silly fishes dint for him and soy,
"Oh look, I think he winked at me?"

So now, with that insight, why in blazes would you go into this business? I've always been somewhat reluctant. I liked small clubs, I am a ham and I am an enjoyer. But on the big stage you get sonic distortion, and my open tunings are a pain in the butt, so it's not very enjoyable.

Yes, at a certain point I became contemptuous of my audience. Critics seemed to praise me when I felt I was poor and slam me when I felt I was at my peak, so that also fed my bad attitude to the business. I've always loved making the albums and the writing, because that's more like the pointing process. The self-promotion used to be distasteful; now it's just kind of funny to me. I guess that's one of the beauties of getting older.

You've said at various points in your career that you regard yourself as painter first and foremost. Is that true?

Oh yes.

In which case, what tipped you over into becoming a songwriter and performer?

Art school. I wrote poems which I didn't show to people, and like most poets I was a bad learner. I was always very involved with music, not as a career direction but as a spirit-lifter, so the irony of my becoming a confessional poet was very great to anyone who knew me in my teens. Anyway, just before I went to art school I picked up a ukulele with the intention of accompanying dirty drinking songs at wiener roasts. It was no more than that. When I got to art college there was a coffee house there, and I went down to see if I could pick up some pin money, and it turned out they were willing to pay me $15 for a weekend . Meanwhile the art education was extremely disappointing to me, because all the professors were fans of De Kooning and Barnett Newman and the Abstractionists, and I wanted classical knowledge. Then when I went East to hear the Mariposa Folk Festival, I discovered the whole Yorkville coffee house scene in Toronto and decided to stay. But Canada has a tendency to eat its young, and most of the coffee-houses preferred to hire mediocre Americans over talented Canadians. That's the unfortunate mental sickness of my people. Once I crossed the border I began to write, and I began to find my real voice. From the first album, it was no longer really folk music. It was just a girl with a guitar, which made it look that way.

So if the profs at Calgary Art Collage had given you the knowledge you wanted, would you have become a singer?

Absolutely not, I would have devoted myself to painting. But then if I hadn't had polio when I was a kid I might have been an athlete! It wasn't until Dylan wrote Positively Fourth Street that a lightbulb went on in my head. I thought, oh my God, we can write about anything now. Prior to that song, anger was a kind of closeted emotion, it just never went into songs. But then, "You gotta lotta nerve to say you're my friend"

David Geffen said you were the only artist he'd ever worked with who wanted to be ordinary. Does that seem a little disingenuous now?

In New York strangers used to holler at me across the street like someone in your class at school, like, "Hey, Joni, when you gonna do a concert?!" That's extraordinary, but it's ordinary. They didn't suck in their breath when they saw me. In the folk clubs you could finish a set and go down and have a drink with people and maybe even go listen to music at their houses. That's the kind of ordinary I'm talking about: you haven't lost your access to life. Once you're trapped in your hotel room, it's all over.

Tell me about leaving Geffen and moving back to Reprise after 23 years.

I had the choice to give this record to Geffen and call it my swansong to head up into the Canadian backbush and get on with my painting. But because Geffen hadn't done much with me in the time I was with them - I was just kind of hired and forgotten, on a lot of levels - the feedback from everyone around was that that would be a shame. And Mo Ostin at Warner’s was very enthusiastic about having me back. See, in my entire career there hasn't been a lot of excitement about my albums coming out. There is excitement about this one, for some reason. People are ready to listen, they're more ready to take something a little more to heart and to mind than they have in the past. And unlike some of my peers I haven't hit a writer's block: when I hit a block I just paint, which is an old crop rotation trick. So since I haven't lost my voice, and since I'm over the middle-age hump and at peace with becoming an elder... although, of course, I did ask myself whether a woman of my age could continue in this youth-oriented genre. As a painter you're just beginning to ripen at 50, but as a musician there's a lot of scrutiny as to how you look and so forth. It's such a shallow and fickle business.

Is it true that David Crosby used to show you off to his superstar cronies - bring you out to play a few songs?

David was very enthusiastic about the music - he was twinkly about it! His instincts were correct: he was going to protect the music and pre-tend to produce me. So we just went for the performance, with a tiny bit of sweetening. I think perhaps without David's protection the record company might have set some kind of producer on me who'd have tried to turn an apple into an orange. And I don't think I would have survived that. The net result of that was that [engineer] Henry Lewy and I made 13 albums together without a producer.

You were never really a hippy, were you?

I was the queen of the hippies, but in a way I wasn't really a hippy at all. I was always looking at it for its upsides and its downsides, balancing it and thinking, here's the beauty of it and here's the exploitative quality of it and here's the silliness of it. I could never buy into it totally as an orthodoxy.

Do you feel your earliest fans had you pegged as a paragon of purity and introspection and then found it hard to adjust to the chic, jazzy Joni of the '70s?

I can't speak for how you're perceived. I can only say that you write about that which you have access to. So if you go from the hippy thing to more of a Gatsby community, so what? It's not a Zelig thing: life is short and you have an opportunity to explore as much of it as time and fortune allow. No subject matter ever seemed barred to me, and no class ever seemed barred. In a way, there is no region for me in the way there might be for someone like Tom Waits. There are some people who want to make a documentary about me, and I don't really know how they would do that. I don't want to bring them into my homes, because you don't really want the lunatic fringe to know where you live. I feel like I belong to everything and nothing, so how could you define my environment?

Who do you regard as your reel peers as writers?

Dylan, Leonard Cohen... that's about it as for as lyricists go. I'm influenced by Shakespeare, not so much by the reading of him as by the idea that the language should be trippingly on the tongue, and also by the concept of the dark soliloquy, with a lot of human meat in it. Obviously it has to be more economical and direct, and that's Dylan's influence on me.

Does it ever strike you as strange that Canadians such as yourself and Cohen and Neil Young and The Band have made some of the most powerful music about America?

Fresh eyes. Hockney made great paintings of LA. The Swiss photographer Frank documented America in the '50s at a time when nobody noticed how culturally peculiar it was. People sometimes don't know what's happening under their noses.

Do you find Los Angeles inspires the kind of apocalyptic ruminations that other songwriters do?

Well, Sex Kills was written on the last night of the riots. To see a license plate with 'Just Ice' on it at that time was so poignant. I mean, did you ever think of 'justice' as two words? From the rappers, maybe...

There was an early gangsta rapper called Just Ice, as it happens.

Maybe that was his car! Anyway, it got me writing.

Has it been strange watching your rock contemporaries turn into virtual Hollywood deities over the course of 25 years?

I'll tell you a funny tale, and then we'll think about whether we should print it or not. I don't like ragging on people and making 'em look bad. This makes [Don] Henley look kinda like a jerk, but shall I tell you it anyway? OK, to me this is kind of funny.

I go to see Sting because my beloved Vinnie [Coluita] is drumming with him, but poor Vinnie's all alone up there, there's no-one with him. So it put me in kind of a bad mood, this show. I kept going out and smoking in the wings. Anyway, afterwards there was a party and I was the first to get there. By now I was real cranky. I see Henley sitting by himself in a long, long, long booth. So I walk over as if to sit down with him and I say, "Hi, Henley", and he does this thing where he looks left and right, with a very worried look on his face. And I know exactly what that means, that he's saving the place for Sting. So I say something casual and go sit at another table with Vinnie and Bruce Springsteen and his wife.

Finally, Sting comes in and sits next to Henley and the room fills up with people. At that point, Henley sends an emissary, a woman, to my table who says, "You can come and sit with Sting and Henley now". So, I launch myself into the air and I yell at Henley over at the end of the room: "Never!"

I mean, the whole idea of that kind of political lamination, frankly, gags me with a spoon. It's so tragically hip, and I think it's the enemy of art. I'm not impressed by stars, you know? I never was as a kid. I'm impressed by heart, and fun, and a lot of things, but stardom in and of itself?

How have your world view and standpoint changed since Dog Eat Dog?

I'm more comfortable in my own skin than I've been in my entire life: I wouldn't trade my fifties for my twenties for anything in the world. No way. In fact I probably went through most of my fear in my twenties and I'm a good deal more fearless today as a result. There are things I have to work on, like I get pugnacious and impatient. I'm impatient with human beings for being stupid assholes.

I'm an elder now! I should still be swinging at things to a certain degree, but you need to serene on down a little bit. So I would say that nothing much about the world shocks me as much as it used to. I was enraged at the time I wrote Dog Eat Dog, but I'm very cheerful now I think I'm in a good place in my own spirit, even if I still get mad in traffic. But I still think you have to tackle the deeper topics

They say that as a writer you're a lyric poet in your youth, in your thirties epic poetry appears because you're going over changes repeatedly. In your fifties, so the theory goes, you become a tragedian. Many of the themes and images on this album have been with me for a long time, but it wasn't until now that I was cheerful enough to tackle The Book of Job.

Have you been disappointed by the sales of your albums since Mingus? You've described yourself as a "radio orphan".

I was completely out of whack with public taste throughout the late '70s and the '80s. People aren't always going through changes at the same time as me, and sometimes I get so far ahead I look like I'm behind. The warp with public taste on Wild Things, for instance, was two-fold. I loved the band on that record, we were all in love with each other, but that was the beginning of drum machines, so no one wanted to hear live playing. Now it's just the opposite. If you put on Hissing now, the playing is beautiful.

With Dog Eat Dog, the press went to sleep en masse: Ronnie Reagan could do no wrong. It took a few years for the press to wake up. This Japanese interviewer said to me, "Joni, you used to be a poet and now you're a journalist." And I said, "That's because America is a land of ostriches and somebody's gotta be Paul Revere." People didn't like the politics on that album. Time magazine called it an adolescent work, yet it contained two of their subsequent cover stories.

How did you feel when Rolling Stone dubbed you 'Old Lady of The Year' back in 1972?

Oh, it was a low blow, and it was unfair. I was not abnormally promiscuous, especially within the context of the free love experiment, so to be turned on by my peer group and made an example, made me aware that the whore/Madonna thing had not been abolished by that experiment. People who were legitimately on that list, like Graham Nash, were gonna call and complain, but then they figured it would fan the flame. There were people on that list like B. Mitchell Reed, whose radio show I'd done and that was all. Assumptions were made in interpreting the lyrics, as they always were, that this was about so-and-so... all that nonsense that destroys the ability of the listener to identify with a song. Plus they were misinterpretations. So that was painful and unnecessary, and Rolling Stone had a policy for years after that to get me.

Still, you have to admit the irony of a song like Man To Man [Wild Things Run Fast], a song about serial monogamy which features not only your husband but two ex-lovers James Taylor and drummer John Guerin.

Oh, I always do that, I'm terrible at that! I've got a new boyfriend now, and John played some drums on one song on the record, and Klein was the producer! And they're all looking at me like, "You asshole", because the boyfriend and I wrote the song, and the old boyfriend who introduced me to Klein is on the drums... I don't know, artists are a strange lot.

But you clearly stay friends with these guys.

Whenever possible. See, my mother says things to me like, "Ducks mate for life", but I guess I am a serial monogamist. Klein and I spent 12 years together. We were good friends in the beginning, then we were lovers, then we were husband and wife. I love Klein: there's a mutual affection there and I can't imagine what would destroy it.

Is there a fundamental frustration about creating art - a restlessness, as you've described it - which makes it hard to live with people?

My main criterion is: am I good for this man? If at a certain point I feel I'm causing him more problems than growth, then if he doesn't have the sense to get out I have to kick him out! The "Mr Mitchell" thing, of course, is prevalent. I was in New Orleans one night and we were partying, and this Greek guy came up and asked me to dance. And he said to me, "In Greece they say Joni Mitchell, she doesn't need a man". I said, "Oh, is that right? All of Greece says this?"

I started in the business kind of ultra-feminine, but as I went along I had to handle so many tough situations for myself - had to be both male and female to myself. So it takes a specific kind of man who wants a strong and independent woman. Klein did, but at the some time there were things about living with 'Joni Mitchell' - not with me - that pinched on his life in a certain way that made me think he needed a break. Our separation, I think, was wholesome - painful and occasionally a little mean, but never nasty or ugly. There was a certain amount of normal separation perversity -he'd spent a third of his life with me, cater all, and I'd spent a quarter of mine with him - but for the most part it was a wonderful growth experience for both of us. Klein would say the friction created a pearl.

Listening to Free Man in Paris again made me think of Dylan saying that you weren't really a woman.

Yeah, they asked him about women in the business and he said, "Oh, they all tart themselves up". And the interviewer said, "Even Joni Mitchell?" And he said, "I love Joni Mitchell, but she's"...how did he put it?..."kinda like a man", or something. It was a backhanded compliment, I think, because I'm probably one of Bobby's best pace runners... you know what I mean, as a poet? There aren't that many good writers. There are a lot that are touted as good, but they're not literature, they're just pretty good for a songwriter.

What was it like singing with Dylan at the Great Music Experience in Japan?

Oh, he's such a little brat, you know. He really is. He's never been very complimentary to my face - most of the boys haven't. But he loved Sex Kills, and was very effusive about it. Anyway, we played three concerts, and they kept shifting my position on the mics and which verses of the songs I was going to sing. On the third night they stuck Bob at the mic with me, and that's the one that went out on tape. And if you look closely at it, you can see the little brat, he's up in my face - and he never brushes his teeth, so his breath was like...right in my face - and he's mouthing the words at me like a prompter, and he's pushing me off the mic. It's like he's basically dipping my pigtail in ink. The press picked up on it and said, "Bobby Smiles!" Yeah sure, because he was having a go at me out there.

Talking of brats, did you over actually work with Prince?

No. He sent me a song once called You Are My Emotional Pump, You Make My Body Jump. I called him up and said, "I can't sing this". He's a strange little duck, but I like him.

There are far less of the guest appearances on the last two albums than we're used to seeing. Is there any reason for that?

One of the reasons for that is that I put a studio in my house. I used to drag those guys in when they were recording across the hall. Billy Idol is cast as the bully in Dancin' Clown because his voice was right, although it was viewed in England as a political and opportunistic move because he was big at the time and my stock was down. Which was so stupid. Even Prince called me up and said, "Who is that guy whooping and hollering all over your record?" And I said it was Billy Idol. "Oh, that's a good idea," he said.

What do you consider the most neglected or underrated music of your career?

I would say Hejira. Court And Spark was about as popular as it got, although with Asylum it got lost because Geffen had just signed Dylan for Planet Waves. Everything after that was compared unfavourably to it. Hissing of Summer Lawns was felt to be too jazzy, and the drums on it were misunderstood. Hejira was not understood at all, but that was a really well-written album. Basically it was kinda kissed off. It's a travelling album, it was written driving from New York to Los Angeles over a period of time, and people who take it with them, especially if they're driving across America, really find it gets to them. Given the right setting, all of my albums have a certain power. I wouldn't recommend them for certain moods, I'd say, "Take this pill and stay away from that one!"

How do you feel about the countless female singer-songwriters you've influenced? You are sure the template for a carton kind of soprano-voiced siren, from Rickie Lee Jones to Stina Nordenstam.

I haven't heard them all, but the one show I heard where this DJ was likening them to me unfavourably, I couldn't see it. He'd say, "This girl has been listening to Court And Spark", and I could not see it. Harmonically there was no resemblance. I mean, I've had girls come up to me and say how influenced they are by me, and then they get up and play and they sound like The Indigo Girls!

Do you find it easier or harder writing songs these days? Do you still, as you once put it, have to be shot on the trails?

It's no easier or harder. It's still a matter of collecting the material and having the time. It will be difficult from here till next February because I'm in the harness promoting this record. Which is unfortunate because I've got ideas. Will they go up into the ether and get lost, or will they yet emerge? I don't know. That's the trouble with the process.

Do you over regret not having had kids?

I think the children of artists are frequently malformed. You can't really do justice to both. My grandmothers both were frustrated musicians in different ways. My paternal grandmother came from Norway, and the story has it that the lost time she cried in her life she was 14, and she was crying because she knew she would never have a piano. And she became a stoic. She had a miserable, nasty life. She had 11 kids and married a mean, poor drunk, but she never wept through all the hardship in all her adult life that anyone knows of.

My maternal grandmother, on the other hand, was a classical musician who come East when the Prairies opened up by train. She was Scottish-French, and they brought an organ in for her and a gramophone. She was a poet and musician, but she still kicked the kitchen door off its hinges out of her frustration at being trapped in the role of a housewife.

So the creative gene then fell upon me, in a woman's form, and in a way you have to safeguard that and do it for them, because after 1965 it was really the first opportunity that women had had in history. There were the George Sands and Georgia O'Keefes who ploughed against the grain. But even Georgia said to me, "Well, I would like to have been a painter and a musician, but you can't do both." I said, Oh yes, you can!" In the end, I'm happier and better off with cats and godchildren. I hove a lot of godchildren.

Twenty years after writing People's Parties are you still living on nerves and feelings"?

No. I still swing by them, but I don't live there.