I found Esther Freud’s I Couldn’t Love You More intriguing and original. Spanning three generations, it follows the lives of three women and the interesting repetition of the trials and tribulations that mark their journeys. I enjoyed the complexity of the storyline which, in reflection, is essentially about the bond between mothers and daughters and the secrets and burdens they carry due to the choices they make. These choices are ultimately shaped by the social and moral boundaries of the societies of the time – or are they owing to the patterns that are seemingly fated to repeat generation after generation and imbedded in a family’s collective psyche?
Freud tells the story of three women: Aoife, set in contemporary Cork, who tries to learn the secret about what happened to her daughter from her dying husband; Rosaleen, a teenager in ’60s London, who falls in love with a sculptor Felix and falls pregnant; and Kate, an artist in the 1990s and mother to a young daughter. Adopted as a child, Kate embarks on a quest to find her biological mother.
Her search leads Kate to a convent in Ireland where she and her daughter find a memorial to the lost babies who were born there and then sold. The convent had provided refuge to desperate pregnant girls, who were then used as labourers while their babies were sold to profit the Catholic Church. Propagated as ‘havens’, these convents were in fact sweatshops for ‘morally defected’ women. In her book, Freud highlights the unimaginable cruelty of this practice and honours the real young women who had suffered at these institutions.
The novel proposes that there is an inevitability regarding patterns in families, and that descendants will be faced with similar patterns and sets of circumstances one way or another. This, in spite of the fact that each generation sets out to live idiosyncratic and individual lives. Freud furthermore reiterates the constancy of choice. Humans always have a choice, whether that be an extreme or harsh decision that doesn’t seem like a choice at all, the fixture of choice is constant and certain, and the direction of our lives are determined by it until our last day.
I would be interested to know what your thoughts are on the book. It’s a fascinating novel for book club discussions, in my opinion.
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