Esther Freud, I COULDN'T LOVE YOU MORE: A Novel
[0:01]Hi, I'm Sivi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast,
[0:05]Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[0:07]If you like this podcast, you will love my new anthology called Moms Don't Have Time to Have Kids.
[0:12]Check it out, and you'll hear from 49 authors about all sorts of things
[0:16]Moms Don't Have Time to Do. All the authors have been on this podcast.
[0:19]Also, check out my TikTok at with Sivi and Tracy.
[0:22]My other podcast, Sex Talk with Sivi and Tracy.
[0:25]Check out Moms Don't Have Time to Write on Medium.
[0:28]And of course, my new publishing company called Sivi Books.
[0:32]And now, back to our daily author interview site and a quick hello from some of my kids.
[0:37]Hi, hello.
[0:38]Enjoy the show.
[0:41]Esther Freud is the author of I Couldn't Love You More, a novel.
[0:44]Esther Freud trained as an actress before writing her first novel, Hittiest Kinky, published in 1992.
[0:49]Hittiest Kinky was shortlisted for the John Wellan Re-Surprise and made it to a film starring Kate Winslet.
[0:55]In 1993, Esther was named a grant of best young British novelist.
[0:59]She had since written seven other novels, including The Sea House, Love Falls, and Lucky Brake.
[1:04]She also writes stories, articles, and travel pieces, and teaches creative writing at the favor academy.
[1:08]Her most recent novel, Mr. Mack and Me, was the winner of the East Anglian Book Award for Fiction 2015.
[1:14]Freud lives in London and Suffolk.
[1:17]Okay, welcome, Esther.
[1:18]Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read books to discuss.
[1:21]I couldn't love you more.
[1:22]It's lovely to meet you in this strange virtual world, and I was just saying how much I was admiring your beautiful colored coded bookshelves behind you.
[1:31]Oh, well, thank you very much.
[1:33]Yes, this is like, it's very comforting to be surrounded by books.
[1:36]There's something deeply calming about it for me, probably for most people, but anyway.
[1:42]Well, what a beautiful novel, very thought-provoking, all these different relationships that you have interweaving everything.
[1:50]Tell listeners what this book is about, please.
[1:53]Okay, well, the book is, it started with the idea of writing about love.
[2:00]I was writing a play, and it was set in a Mens prison, and it was all about a woman who decided that what she really wanted to do was to go into Mens prisons and teach them how to do high-end embroidery.
[2:13]So I spend a year or two immersed in these lives.
[2:16]I thought, when I, my next project, I want to write about love, and I chose three generations of women based very loosely on my own generation, my mother and my grandmother.
[2:27]And so the book is really about the ways that love kind of grows between the generations, the way that love is created and influenced by the kind of love that you have already received.
[2:43]And so we hear from all three women, and at the heart of the story is a big lie, a silence, an evasion.
[2:53]And that really came about, and that was never the plan initially, I didn't really start with a plot, I just started more with a theme and with these three characters.
[3:02]And I started to think about the sort of love life of my grandmother, my own love life, and my mother in the middle.
[3:09]And my mother, I've always known this, but I have to say, I've never given it so much thought, my mother met my father when she was a teenager.
[3:18]And she had me and my older sister, by the time she was 20, and she kept our secret from her parents because she was living an unmarried, behemoth life in Soho's 60s Soho in London.
[3:30]And her parents were, came from Catholic families, they were living in Ireland, and they would have disapproved.
[3:38]And I took that and started to really investigate what it would have been like for her if they had have known that she was pregnant.
[3:46]And I did a lot of research about what happened to young Catholic, especially Irish women in the 60s.
[3:54]And I have to say the 70s and the 80s, and obviously many years before, and often they ended up in mother and baby homes, their babies were taken from them, and the children never knew their mothers will have to find them because it was made very, very difficult to ever trace your mother.
[4:13]Sorry, this isn't. I love it. No, keep going. Keep going. I love the backstory. No, yes, keep going.
[4:19]No, I found myself having kind of thought, I'm a lighter project after my prison work, writing about love. I found myself embroiled in something.
[4:29]crueler, colder, and more brutal than any prison I visited.
[4:34]Wow.
[4:35]Wait, that's crazy about your mom hiding you and your sister.
[4:41]Wait, tell me what happened when she when you were revealed, like what happened then?
[4:45]No, so I think that I was about two or three and my sister was about five when a relative saw her waiting at a bus stop and wrote her her parents and said, Oh, we didn't know your daughter was married.
[4:57]And of course, she wasn't married. And they, I don't actually remember meeting them if I did until we went off on a big trip when I was four to Morocco, which is the basis for my first novel hideous ginky.
[5:11]We went to Marrakesh in a van with some kind of hippie friends of my mothers, maybe it was to get away from the sort of pressured judgmental world of of Britain at that time, and my mother was a very unusual and intrepid woman as you're probably gathering.
[5:29]So we spent two nearly two years living in Morocco traveling and having a huge extraordinary adventures.
[5:36]And when we came back, I remember meeting my grandparents and I think the saddest thing about these stories that I uncovered in my research is that, you know, the parents lost their children, the grandparents lost their grandchildren.
[5:48]And of course, whatever my grandparents felt about the idea of their daughter being an unmarried mother having illegitimate unbaptized children.
[5:58]Of course, when they met their two little granddaughters, they took us into their hearts and we were, you know, they were wonderful.
[6:05]And we spent a lot of our childhood staying with them in Ireland when they ran a farm.
[6:10]And they did well, but there was some, yeah, difficult lonely and unsupported years in the meantime in which my mother struck out on a very independent life.
[6:21]Wow. Have you thought about writing it as a memoir?
[6:25]Well, I haven't because I just drawn to fiction. I'm, you know, I know you're a writer.
[6:31]And what happens is you have an idea and it comes to in a form. So he is kinky came to me in the form of writing a story.
[6:40]And also I didn't remember enough to write a memoir. I was six by the time we returned to England. So I kind of remembered little moments and anecdotes and I kind of created the atmosphere and kind of rolled along with the story.
[6:53]And I made it into a film Kate Winslet played my own. Yes. And it's a beautiful film. I have to say they got the spirit of my story, the kind of adventurous freedom of that time.
[7:05]Wow. Well, I have to say I have to go back and now watch this film. I of course knew about it. And I feel like I have not seen it unless I don't remember, which is totally possible.
[7:14]So of course I've heard of it. So I'm excited to go back, especially now that I've met you that it's and knowing this story that's crazy. Oh my gosh.
[7:23]Did your grandparents have a similar relationship to how do you pronounce a fee.
[7:29]Yeah.
[7:31]Well, I have to say, I don't really know for sure what their relationship was the relationship that was, I guess it's it's interesting how relationships between men and women have changed over the generations.
[7:45]I would say they had a totally dedicated relationship.
[7:49]And I, in the course of writing this book, I thought a lot about the different relationships of the different generations certainly in my lifetime.
[7:59]And how women of my grandmother's generation, they married in the 40s and we're late 30s. I think they married pretty much the trajectory of this novel I've used the dates, you know, just as the war was beginning a second world war.
[8:12]And you know, they married for life. I think what my grandmother felt was, you know, my husband is for life my children will grow up and move away.
[8:20]And I think what my generation felt certainly most of my friends is your children are for life, who knows whether the men will come and and it's changed so much and the dedication and loyalty.
[8:31]In my own generation and the ones around me my even younger friends is very much sort of a dedication to children and a great desire for children and an incredible connection and love with children.
[8:46]And maybe a little less confidence in the male female relationship. So I did look at my grandparents relationship when I was writing this book and see a real sort of beauty in it actually.
[8:58]I think that in some ways the children lose out. It's hard to get it all, you know, it's hard to have enough for the man and the children or the woman and the children or whoever your partner may happen to be.
[9:10]It's true let alone work and everything else in life.
[9:15]Lots of competing demands in the book. There was when Rosalene escapes from the convent and ends up at home twice which was crazy.
[9:25]The second time she went back when she stayed and then came home the next summer and was changed quiet sort of docile version of herself.
[9:34]And there was nothing mentioned of what happened in the convent other than that the nun had said okay well I'm going to take care of this is never happening again.
[9:42]What like my mind went to what kind of abuse was happening there what was happening in those months and so I was wondering if in your research you uncovered things that were happening to the women there or if or if I misread that or or what.
[9:57]I feel that you're referring to to when she's.
[10:00]The child, and she's in a walking school convent, yeah.
[10:02]Yes, sorry.
[10:03]Yeah, I mean, my mother, like Rosaline,
[10:06]went off to a boarding school convent when she was seven.
[10:10]Her sisters were sent when they were four.
[10:13]And so it doesn't take a lot of imagination
[10:15]to imagine how strangely lonely it would be
[10:19]to be brought up like that.
[10:21]I interviewed my mother's cousin,
[10:24]who was at the convent with her.
[10:25]My mother sadly is no longer with us.
[10:28]But her cousin was at school with her.
[10:31]My cousin remembered her incredibly vividly,
[10:34]had so much to say about her, my mother,
[10:36]and this is very typical and telling.
[10:38]Literally had never mentioned this cousin
[10:40]and never really talked about the past.
[10:43]So I didn't say that to the cousin,
[10:44]who was like, is a big part of her life,
[10:46]her relationship with my mother as a child.
[10:50]But she told me some pretty harrowing stories
[10:53]about, you know, being beaten with a slipper
[10:57]and made, you know, to be on silent retreats
[11:01]for days on end, age sort of eight.
[11:03]I would say nothing that wouldn't seem too terrible
[11:07]in some ways for that time.
[11:09]I mean, you know, the Britain has a terrible reputation
[11:13]for boarding school brutality.
[11:15]And so many particularly boys actually
[11:18]were just treated so appallingly over the years.
[11:22]Young, the younger they were,
[11:23]the sort of more brutal of the treatment often was
[11:25]because there was no one to tell and no recourse.
[11:29]So my mother, I didn't actually hear so much
[11:32]from my mother about it.
[11:33]All I knew was that she was unhappy and desperate
[11:38]and did run away often and was always sent back.
[11:41]And really kind of heartbreaking, right?
[11:43]There's heartbreaking.
[11:45]I think that's very much the feeling.
[11:46]If you send your child to boarding school,
[11:47]you've got to stick with it until they stopped complaining
[11:50]and obviously we all stopped complaining after a bit.
[11:53]I said my son is at boarding school.
[11:55]So but I hope that there's, I mean, from what I hear,
[11:59]it's not anything like that.
[12:00]But I mean, I hope I got my gosh.
[12:02]It's very different now.
[12:03]Yes.
[12:04]And I'm sure he's not four years old.
[12:06]No, no, no, he's 14th.
[12:08]Probably an absolute heaven.
[12:10]Yes, he's like, doesn't even want to come up.
[12:11]It's great.
[12:12]I'm thrilled.
[12:13]But so what is the impact?
[12:15]I know through the book we got to watch
[12:17]what happens with Rosalina, she gets older.
[12:20]What was the impact of that on your mother, right?
[12:24]So she went in this very, and this doesn't,
[12:26]I can totally switch gears.
[12:28]This is too invasive or whatever.
[12:29]But I'm like so fascinated by your history.
[12:31]So she goes to the convent and then she becomes
[12:34]this bohemian has children very young and off to Morocco.
[12:37]So by the time she's like 27, she's back in London
[12:42]with having lived this whole life.
[12:43]Like what happened then?
[12:45]And how did it affect how she raised you from that point on?
[12:48]So then, and this is obviously the book diverges,
[12:52]I use just for people who I get confused myself like so,
[12:56]because I use often the knob of something
[12:59]that's autobiographical in my work.
[13:00]And then I kind of riff on it.
[13:02]I love the story to feel as if it is my story.
[13:06]I like to use some find something in a story.
[13:08]If I was just telling and writing a story about women
[13:11]who went through this of trauma of mother and baby homes
[13:14]without finding a way to link it to myself,
[13:16]I would find that hard on the hard days,
[13:18]I think I would lose faith.
[13:20]But my own mother, well, once we were back in England,
[13:24]we actually had a rather kind of quiet,
[13:27]well, quiet compared to the rest I suppose.
[13:30]We went to live in the country.
[13:32]We went to a Steiner school.
[13:34]I don't know.
[13:34]You have Waldorf or so.
[13:36]Oh, like Montessori.
[13:37]Oh, yeah.
[13:38]Yeah, it's not Montessori,
[13:41]but it's a kind of alternative education.
[13:43]And what really was important to my mother
[13:46]it had no religious bias.
[13:48]No one was telling you off the sins
[13:51]that you may have committed almost as you were born.
[13:54]That was important to her.
[13:56]So it was a very creative school.
[13:57]And we lived there for 10 years in the country
[14:00]and various adventures continued to go on
[14:03]as you can imagine.
[14:04]But yeah, we had a calmer time.
[14:07]And so then how did that affect how you brought up your kids?
[14:10]And well, I love the fact that we all try and replicate
[14:14]our parents the way they brought us up and rebel against it
[14:18]all at the same time.
[14:19]It's hard work.
[14:20]I had a great desire for stability
[14:22]because we, even though we lived in the country
[14:25]in the south of England in Sussex for 10 years,
[14:29]we didn't initially have anywhere to live.
[14:31]So we moved and moved and moved.
[14:32]I think we moved 16 times in, in, oh my two.
[14:36]And then we settled down for a bit,
[14:38]then we moved again.
[14:39]So I was very keen on a house, big, solid place
[14:44]to live, but also quite restless.
[14:47]So it was a bit confusing for my children.
[14:48]They're like, mom, stop looking at that house.
[14:51]We're in a house.
[14:52]We just moved.
[14:53]So it's like, I want a really beautiful house.
[14:55]But I'm always like going, we actually live,
[14:57]we have a house where I am right now in the country.
[15:00]But we did used to live in the house next door.
[15:02]And they couldn't believe that I forced them
[15:04]to move to the house next door when it came up as well.
[15:07]And then I saw another house and they were like,
[15:08]mom, stop it.
[15:10]So yeah, I have a mixture.
[15:12]But my kids have had a very stable life compared to mine.
[15:16]And my mother had a very exciting,
[15:19]and rebellious time compared to her upbringing.
[15:22]So yeah, well, you know what I'm saying?
[15:24]You say that about your kids,
[15:25]because just this morning, my daughter,
[15:27]I love to go to open houses and like look at houses.
[15:30]And my favorite things to do.
[15:32]And literally, I don't know,
[15:33]out of nowhere this morning, my daughter said to me,
[15:36]could you promise me that we're not gonna move houses?
[15:39]Like, can you just promise?
[15:40]And I was like, I'm not gonna promise,
[15:42]but it's always fun to look, you know?
[15:44]And she's like, no, that's our, you know, it's our home.
[15:47]Anyway, not here in the city, but out of the city.
[15:49]Anyway, it's that need for stability and home.
[15:52]It's very deep.
[15:54]Yeah, yeah, it is.
[15:56]I like the moment when I'm between,
[15:58]like I'm just about to go somewhere else.
[16:00]That really makes me very happy.
[16:02]I like the little journey between two different places.
[16:06]But knowing where I'm going, yeah.
[16:09]Well, that's also the promise of a new start
[16:11]when you get to literally redo it.
[16:13]And you can be like, well, this is how I'm gonna live now.
[16:15]I don't know.
[16:16]I know.
[16:17]I know.
[16:19]Very exciting.
[16:20]So I'm not making any promises there, but who knows.
[16:23]So in terms of writing,
[16:26]when you were considering all the different characters
[16:28]and the stories and interweaving,
[16:30]did you write it all as it is now?
[16:34]Or did you write one character's narrative?
[16:36]Like, did you write about Kate?
[16:38]Or did you, like, how did that?
[16:40]When did you, how did you do it?
[16:42]How did I structure it?
[16:43]How did you structure it in the writing process?
[16:45]Sure.
[16:46]Well, I started very freely and I wrote very short.
[16:50]I know the chapters are still quite short,
[16:53]but I wrote even shorter chapters,
[16:54]just jumping about all over the place, whatever I wanted to do.
[16:58]So I started with, you know, one character
[17:00]and a few pages later, I suddenly put the other,
[17:03]I didn't even write their stories chronologically.
[17:07]And I thought that I would be able to maybe get away with it
[17:10]and have an incredible tapestry patchwork
[17:14]of three women's lives reflecting and dancing off each other.
[17:18]And I went on like this for about 500 pages
[17:21]and I handed it to my editor who looked,
[17:24]I felt for her, her eyes were kind of wide and blinking
[17:26]and said, okay, well, how about writing each person's story
[17:31]separately one at a time?
[17:33]And I was like, hmm, okay.
[17:37]And I decided that there was something in the middle.
[17:40]I didn't really want to do that
[17:41]because I wanted for my reader to read one person's story
[17:47]knowing all sorts of things about them
[17:49]from having just read a little chapter
[17:51]of someone else's point of view.
[17:53]I wanted it to overlap and interweave
[17:55]and to echo each other, all the stories.
[17:58]But I calmed down with my kind of desire
[18:02]to be very, very ill.
[18:04]I wanted to write something in a slightly different
[18:06]freer style than I ever had.
[18:08]And I wanted to really play with narrative.
[18:10]I used lots of different ways of, you know,
[18:13]it's one is in the first person and the present tense.
[18:16]And we've got a third person
[18:17]and one is kind of a retelling backwards through life.
[18:20]And I just, I was having so much fun.
[18:23]So I calmed down, I took each story
[18:26]and I put it into its own document
[18:28]and I put it chronologically.
[18:31]And I cut out about 100 pages
[18:33]that were set in the 70s of Rosalind's life.
[18:36]So we never meet her again until the very end,
[18:40]which I was sad about.
[18:41]And I'm hoping I can use that 100 pages for this.
[18:44]We all tell ourselves it wasn't wasted, but sadly,
[18:47]it's very rare you can use those things again,
[18:49]but anyway, I wasted just.
[18:51]You should do an audio original with just that.
[18:56]Oh, just that bit.
[18:57]I have, I'm writing short stories at the moment
[18:58]and I have managed to take one section
[19:01]and put it into a story.
[19:02]And I'm so not sure if it really fits in there.
[19:04]So I just shoe on it in somewhere.
[19:08]There's one bit I was really sad to lose,
[19:10]but the book was so much better for it.
[19:12]And people who want me could have followed
[19:14]what was going on.
[19:15]And that obviously in the end is the only one.
[19:18]And I handed it back.
[19:21]And my editor looked incredibly relieved and well, amazing.
[19:26]So are you working on anything new now?
[19:30]Yeah, so I wrote a short story
[19:33]not long after finishing this book.
[19:35]I guess a year or so ago.
[19:37]And it was actually inspired by the book.
[19:39]Sometimes you have even more to say
[19:41]than we'll fit into this long book.
[19:43]I had so much to say.
[19:44]And it was actually, I teach creative writing sometimes.
[19:48]And I was teaching a course
[19:49]and I asked everyone to write a story.
[19:51]And I said, the story should have the theme of a journey.
[19:54]And I suddenly remembered that when I was about 14
[19:57]and my sister was 16, we went.
[20:00]to Ireland and to visit my grandparents who just retired.
[20:04]And we started sort of traveling around the country,
[20:06]partly because it was hard to be in a little retirement
[20:09]bungalow with them.
[20:10]And we went around the country and we,
[20:13]there was just one thing that caught my imagination
[20:15]when I was thinking about my journey story.
[20:18]It was when we met her in the west of Ireland
[20:22]in the middle of nowhere.
[20:24]We bumped into a monk who asked us
[20:26]if we'd heard of the Beatles.
[20:27]And we were so sort of appalled in a friend
[20:29]to think that we who considered ourselves rather cool
[20:32]had never heard of the Beatles.
[20:34]So that became part of a story.
[20:36]And it was actually just a few weeks ago published
[20:39]by the New Yorker, which was a dream I hadn't even had.
[20:43]And so, but since then, I just decided
[20:46]to keep writing short stories all from the point
[20:49]of view of the same narrator, sort of based
[20:52]in some ways in my life.
[20:54]And there, yeah, I'm just now in the kind of
[20:58]what I always think of as the murky middle.
[21:00]I've got some really great stories at the beginning.
[21:02]I've got a great one for the end.
[21:04]Oh, God, I've just got to find those middle ones
[21:06]to make the thing pull together.
[21:08]And I'm, yeah, I'm, it's, every book has a bit
[21:12]that's hard work for me.
[21:13]It's almost always the two thirds of the way in,
[21:17]I find hard.
[21:18]Interesting.
[21:19]So that's what I am.
[21:20]Well, that sounds wonderful too.
[21:23]Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?
[21:26]Well, the only advice that I have
[21:30]that I think is actually really helpful
[21:32]is to try and create some momentum in your work, you know?
[21:35]To just set yourself a few hours, if that's all you can find,
[21:39]and ideally around the same time every day,
[21:43]and to actually sit down and write.
[21:47]And not lots and lots of research and not lots of thinking,
[21:51]and not lots of talking, just to write.
[21:54]And even if most of what you write isn't to your pleasing,
[21:57]there might be one beautiful, clear, clean line
[22:00]that makes you sing.
[22:02]And that's all you need.
[22:04]And you doesn't matter how many words you write.
[22:06]You can actually cut words.
[22:08]I call it paying attention to your story.
[22:12]If you do that, you know, if you did that every day
[22:15]for a year, you would have something.
[22:17]And that is what I would say.
[22:19]if you really do want to make something,
[22:21]think of it less as writing, but more sort of making,
[22:24]it is compiling.
[22:25]I often think of instead of writing more,
[22:28]sort of, you know, making it longer.
[22:30]I think of fattening it, widening it.
[22:32]So I rewrite it a lot at the beginning.
[22:35]It's a fattening and widening suddenly.
[22:37]Oh, I know what I want to write.
[22:39]And I like that.
[22:40]I was just doing that this morning
[22:42]and one of these murky middle stories.
[22:44]And I suddenly felt myself surprised at where I was going.
[22:49]A lot happier than when I was worrying about it
[22:51]and not writing yesterday.
[22:55]Yes, the worry, the worry can take over
[22:58]pretty much everything.
[22:59]Yeah.
[23:00]Less thinking of writing is what I tell myself.
[23:03]That's good words to live by.
[23:05]Yeah, excellent.
[23:07]Well, thank you so much.
[23:08]Esther, this has been so interesting.
[23:10]And the way, just sitting here listening to you talk,
[23:12]your voice is so melodic and the accent
[23:16]and your thoughts and the way you speak
[23:18]is so beautiful.
[23:19]This is like, I feel like I've just like,
[23:21]I don't know, gone to the theater or something.
[23:23]Like I feel refreshed and had an injection
[23:26]of creativity or something.
[23:27]So thank you.
[23:28]Thank you.
[23:29]That's lovely.
[23:31]All right, we'll have a great day
[23:32]and it was lovely to meet you.
[23:34]Yeah, great to meet you and good luck
[23:36]with all your various ventures.
[23:38]Thank you very much.
[23:39]Good luck with the murky middle.
[23:41]Thank you.
[23:42]Okay. Bye bye.
[23:43]Bye bye.
[23:45]Thanks for listening to this episode
[23:47]of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[23:49]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram,
[23:51]at Zebioans and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[23:54]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebioans.com
[23:57]and sign up for my virtual book club
[23:58]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[24:01]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan,
[24:02]at Tech's jers sound for the sound editing.
[24:05]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[24:06]for providing this fantastic intro and outroom music.