The Stepmother’s Diary, by Fay Weldon
‘These modern, all-inclusive families of ours, created by the passing sexual interest of a couple in each other … can give birth to chaos’, observes Emily, a promiscuous north London Freud- ian analyst and mother of Sappho, the stepmother of the title. The novel begins when pregnant Sappho, on the run from her older, widowed husband, Gavin, thrusts a bag bulging with diaries and fictionalised autobiography into Emily’s hand. ‘Please don’t read them’, says Sappho. Of course I meant to read them, Emily silently tells the reader. I am a mother, and have my daughter’s best interests at heart.
One wonders in this book whether any character is capable of having the best interests of anyone else at heart — indeed, do any of them have a heart at all? To be benign is to be impotent in Fay Weldon’s world; any willed act equals harm.
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