Excerpt from How to be Good

Hornby: Katie is a doctor and has always been the moral conscience of her family and her relationship. At the beginning of the book, she's having an affair. In her own complex moral calculations, she's entitled to this affair. Then, when her husband is healed after going to see a healer for a bad back, he comes back wanting to change the world and his marriage to work. Katie suddenly feels that she's on the moral back foot, having been on the moral front foot all this time. In this excerpt, David, the husband, has just given some of their dinner away to the homeless.

Excerpt: "None of us feel like eating that night - not that there's much to eat anyway. I had planned to microwave the frozen lasagna, but there is none left. It has already been driven to Finsbury Park, where it was served up in paper plates to the winos who hang out on benches just inside the gates on Seven Sisters Road.(David dished it out on his own while the rest of us sat in the car. My daughter Molly wanted to go with him, but I wouldn't let her - not, if I'm honest, because I thought she was in any danger, but because she is nauseating enough at the moment as it is. I was worried that if I had to watch her feeding the poor like an eight-year-old Dickensian charity lady I would begin to hate her too much to provide proper maternal care.)

When we get back home, I excuse myself and go and lie down in the bedroom with the Sunday papers, but I can’t read them. The stories no longer refer to me me me, but to David, and the sorts of things he would Do Something About. After a little while I find that I am beginning to see news stories not in terms of information, but in terms of potential trouble for my family, and for the contents of my bank account and freezer. One article, about a group of Afghan refugees holed up in a church in Bethnal Green, I actually tear out and throw away, because it contains enough misery and hardship to starve us all.

I look at the gaping hole in the newspaper and suddenly feel very tired. We cannot live like this. Not true, of course, because we can, comfortably - less comfortably than before, maybe, but comfortably nevertheless - we will not starve, no matter how much lasagna's given away. OK, then. So. We can, but I don't want to. This is not the life I chose for myself. Except that is not true, either, because I did choose, I suppose, when I said that I would marry David for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live: this, obviously, is relevant, because he may well be sick, and poverty may well be approaching fast.

What did I think I was choosing when I married David? What do any of us think we're choosing? If I try to recapture now the semiformed fantasies I had then, I'd say they erred on the side of prosperity and health, rather than anything very difficult. I thought, I suppose, that we'd be poor but happy to begin with - meaning that we would be living in a small, cute flat and spending a lot of time watching TV or drinking halves of beer in pubs and making do with our parents' hand-me-down furniture. In other words, the difficulties I was prepared to tolerate in the early years of my marriage were essentially romantic in their nature, inspired by the clichés of young married life as depicted in TV comedies - or possibly, given that most TV comedies are more sophisticated and complex than my fantasies, by building society advertisements."