My dad and I believe in many of the same things: cheesecake; the Geelong football club; my mum. And that we should immediately be experts at anything. First try. No practice. No revision.

He taught me this in kindergarten. Every day he pushed me to be brilliant. We played spelling games in the car and did maths workbooks for fun. Before I started school I had “published” a library of my own books, complete with copyright information. I had become – and I’m assuming this is true of most Guardian writers – a precocious kid who irritated everyone around her by being boisterously, aggressively right about everything all of the time. Just like my dad. (Obviously I’ve grown a lot since then.)

So when he asked, at age 77, if I would edit the novel he’d been working on, I responded with what I’ll generously call abject terror. I knew, from teaching hundreds of later-life would-be writers, that there would be feedback. Good Lord, would there. And I also knew, from a lifetime of being explicitly told, that we always got things right the first time. No exceptions.

I wanted to say no. I wanted to tell him, Dad, our relationship is too precious to me. “I’m not sure I........

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