This is not so much a cop-out as a recognition of the fact that marriage, for all its legal and social connotations, remains the ultimate subjective experience. It’s the plot that drives much of western literature and drama; it is presented to successive generations (especially women) as both the highest goal and a yoke of oppression. Lisa Appignanesi OBE FRSL has written many books, fiction and non-fiction, including the memoirs Losing the Dead and Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love.

But the way I’m diagnosing resentment is as a more or less unavoidable aspect of globalisation and its discontents. So as they saw it, their choice was between condemning him for being bad, or showing a liberal understanding of why he turned out so bad. And also because, for Jews in particular, the idea of the EU often has less to do with a free-trade organisation than with keeping the peace in Europe, and the desire to just be able to move elsewhere if you ever need to.For if the word ‘Jew’ is not fitting in comfortably with other words, if there’s a kind of pause before the word, a momentary decision about how to utter it exactly, then that tells us something. And that’s the familiar Jewish stereotype, but it’s also the product of a specific social situation, and I think it’s quite extreme in some ways, in a culture like this one – in particular where there’s a strong class system, where everybody knows their place, and you’re the people who don’t seem to have one. She has been Chair of the Freud Museum London, President of English Pen, and Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. EV: We wondered if this idea of the joke in your book The Jewish Joke (2018) could be linked to theatre.

Baum brings this sharp self-awareness to her book; as she reflects with the analytical eye of an academic on different iterations and meanings of matrimony, she also frequently illustrates her points with scenes from her own marriage. Because when you’re feeling hopeless, really hopeless and despairing, if something manages to make you laugh, your gratitude for that is overwhelming – like a kind of prayer. Joking, then, is a form of common language that can also offer its speakers a degree of privacy, by creating a kind of outsider discourse within the dominant discourse, one that speaks for the jokers’ own lack of definition or certainty. Exploring her own marriage has given Baum a unique vantage point from which to investigate the private intricacies of other people's arrangements . It has often been regarded as the most bourgeois and conservative of institutions, while proving flexible enough to accommodate radical reinventions.Baum herself has tackled the subject before, in a different medium; together with her husband, Josh Appignanesi, she is the co-creator of two films, The New Man and Husband, documentary (mockumentary? There are all kinds of closed spaces that I respect, but I also recognize that tribalism, in the way we’re seeing it at the moment, is so… toxic. And I’ve also known how to access joy, how to access feelings of awe and humility – through the religion. And I feel this is the case with all feelings – that they need to be admitted, even if only to yourself.

In my public events for the book, I’ve been talking quite a bit about envy because I consider it to be the feeling that is hardest to admit, hardest to share – it’s the most scandalous and the most morally disapproved of. EV: When we talked to Ronald Harwood, he said England was the most welcoming country, that he has never experienced antisemitism. So, that would be a question: Have you ever experienced antisemitism in London, either blatant, or low-level? DB: Feelings are contagious – you can be a winner in a society, and still be caught up in envious feelings.So that wasn’t a direct experience of aggressive, hostile antisemitism, but it was implicit in the acceptance of Shylock as staged Jew. Baum’s methodology is to look at what is missing – a philosophy of marriage, a clear idea of what this dominant structure is and how it influences lives. For anyone who has experienced, contemplated or rejected it, On Marriage offers a fascinating exploration of an institution that, for better or worse, “continues to shape and carry our human story”. At the core of OCLW's new programme on Writing Jewish Women's Lives, our new series of afternoon literary seminars are a chance to discuss books by and about Jewish women. And that’s not just a secular idea: that idea of sanctifying or desecrating the name of God through your behaviours in public really belongs to the religion, as well.

DB: In the introduction to my book I’m interested in whether there’s much of a difference, really, between a word that you whisper – which tends to be the British way – and one that you’re required to shout out – in a declamatory, American way. Particularly when it becomes tyrannical, when you really can’t afford not to be witty – then we know something must be up, right? But it’s telling that an early chapter centres on the concept of veils; in a nod to the story of Salome, she presents seven types of “veil” that serve to occlude or reveal meaning in marriage, and the reader is conscious throughout that she has chosen to draw a veil over the most intimate elements of her own relationship, or at least to offer only selective glimpses in the service of broader arguments. From Freud to Ferrante, and One Thousand and One Nights to Fleabag , she looks at marriage in all of its forms – from act of love to leap of faith, and asks: what are we really doing when we say ‘I do’? And for me also it’s about the shared nature of feelings – they’re not private, and they shouldn’t be bound up with an ideology of privacy and property.It was left to me, therefore, to point out that Shakespeare’s Jew was an anti-Semitic stereotype and that Shylock was in fact not an accurate depiction of how I generally acted, nor how my family acted and nor how my ancestors acted, even when faced with persecution and prejudice.