"I can already safely say that, just as with the book The Woman - which was basically not only about the woman - I already knew and saw during the process that this book would not be purely about the man either. I wanted to include a lot of things about the question of masculinity, about starting to solve the guilt, about grief, death, goodbye, letting go, flowers, about myself. Really a lot. Answers to a series of questions. Suggestions about guys. For example, "why did my partner live parallel to another girl for eight months life by my side while proving how much he was in love with me?” I got an email like this the other day! It just blew up at Christmas time…

When this book was being written, I called around to a bunch of guys I know. From teenagers to people in their fifties, I asked them all the same question: what makes them feel like a man. When asked what makes them feel like a man, a significant number of men answered that they had never thought about it before, and this question came as quite a surprise to them... However, in the case of women, the last five to ten years were about nothing else than they define what it is to be a woman… It seems like these are things that guys don't usually talk about. Or just very superficially. About being a man itself... Not because "it's completely self-evident" that the person is a man. It doesn't even arise that anything could question this..."