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AT 18, I spent a year volunteering at a school in the north east of Brazil. Most days, as I walked along the seafront to work, I would pass a coconut seller who would hail me in Portuguese: ‘Hey, Gringa.’

After a few months, he tweaked his greeting to: ‘Hey Gringa, still here.’ By the time I was leaving, he’d settled on: ‘Hey Gringa, yet again you are still here.’

His manner was always very friendly, but sometimes you just want a face that fits.

On occasional rainy days, when heavy grey skies would remind me of home, being called out as an alien wasn’t helpful. I had naively hoped ‘to find myself’ on my year out, not to be forever found out.

Some of fiction’s most gripping stories follow people trying to discover themselves or forge their identity. In Dickens’s Great Expectations, Pip is a poor orphan, yet yearns to be the social equal of Miss Havisham’s ward, Estella.

After a mysterious benefactor makes him rich and he goes to London to become a gentleman, he makes some terrible misjudgements. But he never loses kindness. Estella, brought up to be coldhearted, recognises this. ‘Suffering . . . has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but — I hope — into a better shape.’

Zadie Smith’s Swing Time also explores betterment and belonging. ‘People come from somewhere, they have roots,’ insists the narrator’s mother, criticising her mixed-race daughter’s career as a PA to a Madonna-like star. Yet selfpitying restlessness seems part of her daughter’s psyche.

Jeffrey Eugenides’s bestseller Middlesex explores gender and ethnic identity through its protagonist, Greek-American Cal: ‘I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.’

Far from offering a neat resolution to Cal’s identity crisis, it proves to be the beginning of a lifelong exploration — as becoming comfortable in our skin is for us all.