Mothers and daughters: I Couldn’t Love You More, by Esther Freud, reviewed

A new novel by Esther Freud — her ninth — raises the perennial but always fascinating question about the use of autobiography in fiction. Since her first novel, Hideous Kinky, Freud has frequently used an underpinning of autobiography, but mostly it’s been discreet. You didn’t need to distinguish what was life, what fiction. But with I Couldn’t Love You More the auto-biographical element has become overt and somehow obtrusive. Freud’s previous novel, Mr Mac and Me, concerned with Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s stay in Suffolk at the start of the second world war, is on the cusp of being an historical novel. This one is close to autofiction.

In the acknowledgements, she pays tribute to her ‘much-missed mother’ who at 18 ‘found herself pregnant and unmarried’.The idea for this novel is based on Freud wondering what would have happened to her mother if, like so many young women, she had ended up in one of those notoriously cruel Irish Catholic mother and baby homes.