More about my mother: Elaine, by Will Self, reviewed

Inspired by his late mother’s diaries, Will Self’s fictionalised Elaine covers just over a year in the life of its titular character. Elaine Hancock is a trailing wife living in upstate New York, where her husband, John, teaches English at Cornell.

It is not for the faint-hearted to write about one’s mother’s sex life. But Will Self is no stranger to outrageousness

Zigzagging chronologically, the novel takes place in the mid-1950s – more than a decade before Self lived in Ithaca with his parents, who then separated. He portrays it as a loose time at the faculty: the Hancocks display a ‘masochistic intimacy’ by swapping notes about the people they’ve drunkenly ‘necked’ during evenings out. Disdainful of her husband (‘a milquetoast man who doesn’t know how to make love properly’), Elaine flirts with extramarital affairs but mostly indulges in a rich fantasy life. She tends to fall for ‘difficult, screwy guys’, and when rebuffed ‘[dogs] these men’s footsteps as they try to escape her clutches’.