Motherload

Thank goodness for Andrea Levy! I knew when I read The Help that there was something subtly wrong with it. Essentially its politics were good, its characters were interesting and readable, and the ending a happy one for most concerned. Big ticks all round. So what was wrong with it? Nothing so simple as the fact that it was written by a white woman — after all, no one can help the colour of their skin, right? No, it was that The Help is enslaved to the narrative of slavery, while The Long Song is emancipated from it. This seems to me the task of fiction — to free itself from the facts, in order to imagine the lives that might have fleshed out those facts. Not properly, but improperly. It will be argued that The Help does this fleshing out in spades, and so it does. And it's not about your actual slavery on Jamaica, but about racial integration in the deep South of the United States. Yet it misses out one key ingredient. Uneasiness. The Help makes us feel safe and cosy. It is i...

I found this absolutely brilliant potted history of marriage today, instead of writing my book on parenting... Ten key moments in the history of marriage What I love about this piece is that it is so specific about each era of marriage. In 10 simple steps, it shows the exact evolution from chattel to love match across nearly 2000 years of the institution, via the different edicts and statutes that first accommodated, then enshrined, social change. My sense of history is not nearly specific enough, because I stopped studying history at FOURTEEN. This is because, in my lovely, proper girls' school, we had to choose between history and geography at O level. Woe betide anyone who thought it might possibly be useful to go on studying both — gosh, it might take you over the decreed number of subjects ! Meanwhile the parallel boys' school merrily put its gilded youth in for French and maths early, got them on to O/A level, and let them do as many O levels as they enjoyed. Ah! The dif...

Start the Week on Radio 4 this morning made me seethe. Colm Toibín and Will Eaves were both talking about the family. Colm, a wonderful essayist, has already produced a great set of mother-killing scripts in an earlier book, Mothers and Sons . Now he seems to be plundering both that and his other fabulous work on Henry James, to go over and over the same idea: to liberate yourself you must effectively kill your parents. Will Eaves at least managed to come up with a rather brilliant rebuttal of why biographical readings of novels are always wrong: you start with a seed based in the reality of a family, and it combines with a fantasy. And it is the job of the novelist to craft a freestanding structure out of those two interdependent things. I love his emphasis on the craft of writing, remembering that it is a labour, that writers are journeymen, travelling between market towns to sell their hard work. Why, then, was I so affronted by two gentlemen talking about the craft of wri...