Tell me something about yourself.

The night before I was born, my mother had a strange dream.

She dreamt that she had given birth to a beautiful baby with fluffy blue-black hair. When she looked at its shoulders she saw that it had little wing-buds. "Are you a baby, or an angel?" she asked.

"Neither," the baby answered. "I am a bird." And then it grew wings and flew away. She ran after it, calling, but it did not look back.

The next day she gave birth to a beautiful baby with fluffy blue-black hair.

"What are you going to call him?" asked the midwife.

"Jay," she said. "He is a bird."

And the midwife said, "That’s nice, dear," and went away thinking my mother was crazy. People often think that about my mother. I don't think she is, exactly. She just has a different way of seeing things to other people.

Did your father think she was crazy?

I don't know what my father thought about my mother. He died when I was still quite young. Sometimes I think I can remember a tall man in a suit who sang lullabies to me in a beautiful baritone voice, but that could have been a dream.

Why didn't you ask your mother what he was like?

She doesn't like to talk about him. He died of cancer and I know she feels guilty. That's another reason people think my mother is crazy; because she always thinks problems are her fault, even when they're not.

The cancer could have been her fault, though. No one knows what caused his cancer.

Are you angry at your mother because she let your father die?

No.

I want to talk about something else now.

What do you want to talk about?

Birds.

Okay, tell me about birds.

I've been fascinated with them ever since I can remember. People say it's probably because of my name, but I think it's because birds are the embodiment of everything I'm not.

That doesn't quite make sense.

I remember, once, I got home from school early, and I couldn't find my mother. I went through the house, looking for her. I wanted to tell her about something that had happened at school. I don't remember what. It probably wasn't important.

"Mum?" I called. "Mum? Where are you?"

I went into her bedroom. She wasn't there. But as I stood by her bed I heard what sounded like coughing. It came from her bathroom. I knocked on the door. "Mum, are you okay?"

The coughing stopped.

"I’m okay," said a muffled voice. "Go back to the lounge, I'll be there in a minute."

The coughing resumed.

Confused, I went to leave, but in the corridor a cold realisation struck me. She was being sick. She wasn't coughing, she was being sick. And at that moment I wanted nothing more than to escape, to fly away, to be anywhere but in that corridor, leaning against the wall and knowing that my mother wasn't okay at all.

I don't understand.

If you knew my mother, you would. She's terribly, terribly thin. I'd always thought it was from exercise. I'm not very smart sometimes.

How old were you when this happened?

Old enough to understand that my mother had a problem.

But not old enough to understand that her problems weren't mine.

Do you think that’s when you—

You're a lot like me sometimes.

How so?

You think that when you know the cause, you know the cure. It's tempting to pinpoint everything on that one little moment, isn't it? But things aren't that simple.

I would have thought that someone in your profession would know that.

Let's get back to you. I accept that it wasn't the defining moment in your life, but that event still had an effect, didn't it?

Yes.

It made me understand the dream.

What dream?

The dream my mother had before I was born.

How did it do that?

Deep down, my mother's eating disorder wasn't caused by the media or peer pressure or anything like that. It wasn't even about being thin. She just wanted to purge herself of everything she hated and was, so she could become everything she loved and wasn't.

Maybe that's stupid. I don't know. I've done a lot of stupid things myself.

The fact is, the dream wasn't about me. It was about her. She wasn't chasing the baby because she wanted it to come back. She just wanted to go with it.

I'm not the only one who wants to be a bird sometimes.

Did your father know about the eating disorder?

Sometimes I think that he did, and it scared him so much that the fear acted like a poison and that's what gave him cancer. Fear. But if fear caused cancer, everyone would die from it, so I guess I'm crazy.

Maybe you just have a different way of seeing things to other people.

No. If things were like that, I wouldn't be here.

It's 5 o' clock, I'm afraid. Well, Jay, I think we've made some real progress. Same time next week?