the generation game

Some thoughts on

I couldn't love you more
by Esther Freud
Bloomsbury 2021

I've been following the work of Esther Freud since the time when we both turned 30, and as we both turned 60 last year, that's half our lifetimes, scary thought. The mix of dysfunctional families and artsy / intellectual people populating her novels always speaks to my own views and experiences to a certain extent, even if my family doesn't have quite as famous people in it as hers. Thanks to this I always find something in her books to relate to, although more of it in some books and a bit less in others.

My favourite so far has been Summer at Gaglow (read before I had a regular blog so I may not have reviewed it, will have to re-read and review!), which reflects her mixed German/British heritage to great effect. This, her ninth novel, is at least as rich and rewarding as I remember Gaglow to be, so it may well be my new favourite (until I re-read Gaglow).

Whereas many of the other novels feature on young(ish) people's experience (eg Love Falls, Lucky break), this one skilfully interweaves three generations (plus a young girl in a smaller role) of women, who have suffered from various degrees of male awfulness and society prejudice in their different lifetimes. The connecting thread is that the middle generation woman becomes pregnant and is forced to deliver her daughter in a convent in Ireland where children born "in sin" are routinely offered for adoption. Freud has written about the real life background that informed this side of her novel in the Guardian. In real life, her mother shared many of the experiences of the middle protagonist but narrowly escaped the fate of giving birth in the convent.

It is both helpful and scary that Kate, the younger protagonist born in the convent, is my age (as many of Freud's protagonists happen to be, because it also happens to be her age). So it is easy to imagine the other generations in the novel, as they neatly align with generations in my family. And of course I am also taking notes re how to turn one's family history into fiction.

All in all, highly recommended to readers of all ages and generations.

I'm loving the photo by Willy Ronis used for the cover of my edition. It shows Gaston Berlemont's pub, The French House, in Soho, in 1955.

PSA: As I now have separate tags for literature written in French, Spanish, Galician, I should reserve the literature tag for books written in English - this will need some tidying up as I appear to have used it randomly over the last 15 years.