The oppression of women by mince.

When I was growing up, I remember my mum as an excellent and adventurous cook.

She put dinner on the table every night, and it was always delicious, cooked from scratch, made with love. She stayed up to date with what was new and interesting in the culinary world, without being too faddish. She made curries from Madhur Jaffrey's books, and cut recipes out of the Good Weekend and tried them.

I was surprised when I once heard her say to my aunt something to the effect of, "It's not the cooking I mind, it's the deciding. I hate choosing what to make every night".

As a kid I couldn't understand that.

Imagine being in charge! Imagine the heady power of deciding whether we were having schnitzel or meatloaf!

Watch: What Type Of Friend Are You? Post continues after video.

Now, 15 years into being the main cook and co-menu-planner for my own household, I get it. I get it so hard. I am so tired of dinner. I don't even have particularly fussy eaters, though they definitely have their preferences.

I just can't face another week when we sit down on Sunday night and decide, once again, which order the five or six dinners in our current rotation will be served in.

Will it be Spaghetti Bolognese on Monday or Wednesday?

Shall we make it into Horizontal Spag Bol (lasagne)? Or will we do Shepherd's Pie and act like it isn't just Bolognese under mash? Or will we add Mexican spices and eat it in taco shells?

Or will we season it with soy sauce and have it with rice and pretend it's Japanese?

It's the relentless carousel of chicken breasts, something vegetarian, fish if I can convince everyone to get on board, and then pasta pasta pasta until we feel we deserve a pizza.

Then the whole sorry thing starts again.

Following the release of my new novel, Your Friend and Mine, feedback is starting to come in from readers. The book is about a woman, Margot, whose dead best friend, Tess, sends her a series of letters and a generous amount of money, and gives her the opportunity to take a break from her life in Sydney, travel to London and carry out a series of strange but meaningful missions on her behalf.

It explores many deep and complex themes. And what almost every reader who knows me at all has said about it is: 'This is about how much you hate cooking dinner, right?'

"Of course it isn't", I reply each time, irritated.

"It's about regret, friendship, ambition, ageing, love, purpose, revenge, and many more deep and complex themes. Themes like boredom. The boredom of a woman who has been running a restaurant for two decades and whose lifelong passion for food, for dreaming up new recipes and filling the bellies and hearts of her community has begun to wane, so that she…

"Oh. Yes, I see. This is about how much I hate cooking dinner."

When I floated this theory past my husband, he asked, "Did you travel to London for research and then spend a year writing a hundred-thousand-word treatise on how much you hate making dinner?"

"I think I might have," I replied. "I mean, sure it's disguised quite heavily in parts as being about other issues, but yeah, I think it's also about the oppression of women by mince."

In the book, Margot ends up in London for a couple of weeks, with the money to dine anywhere she wants. She stays in a hotel and there is no possibility she can make dinner, even if she wants to.

She wonders if her love of food might come back if she eats enough new and interesting things, if she might reappear like Hush in Possum Magic. She is forced to face what else in her life is causing this culinary malaise, because it does go deeper than food.

But for the rest of us, while the monotony of deciding what to serve our families for dinner every night might not be the sole cause of our existential ennui, it's certainly not helping.

While I hope, as all authors do, that this book will be read widely and received warmly, I also hope it will start a much-needed conversation about the tyranny of dinner.

Jessica Dettmann is a Sydney-based writer. Her fourth novel, Your Friend and Mine, (Atlantic Books) is out now.

More stories like this:

• The death of the family dinner table.

• In defence of fast dinners.

• We asked women about the mental load of caring. Their answers were overwhelming.

Feature Image: Getty.