The Mothers Who Lost Their Children For Falling In Love With Other Women

Añadido: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]So, it's not that it's illegal for them to fall in love, but the problem is it's it's kind of incompatible in the court's mind and the mind of the judge that that Dawn could be a mother and a lesbian at the same time. So, it's kind of you can be you should be a mother, that's ideal. If you must be a lesbian, fine, but you really cannot be both that all at once. Claire Lynch's novel A Family Matter will, I think, once read, never leave you. The story that she tells details the disintegration of the marriage of Dawn and Heron and what happens with their daughter. Dawn falls in love with Hazel and because she falls in love and leaves her husband for a woman, the path she then has to walk down is not just littered with stones. It's got potholes of prejudice and injustice and great big rocks of unhappiness everywhere you look, really. The book is written across two timescapes, one where the daughter, Maggie, we meet as an adult with her own husband and children, and one where we meet her as a child caught in a breakup that denies her and her mother a lot. It is Claire's first novel, which is hard to believe, because I mean, it's won the Gold Prize at the Nero Book Awards. Um you have been uh congratulated by Jenny Godfrey, Barbara Kingsolver, Nick Hornby. I mean, it's a very, very good novel. You have written non-fiction before. Was the leap into fiction an easy one to make?

[00:01:24]>> I don't know about an easy one to make.

[00:01:26]I think I took a little sort of toe in the water with the non-fiction that was the first creative rather than academic writing, which I don't I'd done before.

[00:01:35]Um and then I sort of had that uh I don't like to say midlife crisis necessarily, but a bit of a change in my sort of perspective and thought, if I'm not going to do it now, if I don't take the chance, will I ever write a novel?

[00:01:47]So, it was a sort of um personal test, maybe. And yes, I have have been very lucky.

[00:01:53]>> [laughter] >> Yeah, you absolutely passed. And it's always difficult when we talk about novels, because we don't want to put people off reading it and we don't want to spoil an ending and all of that.

[00:02:03]tread carefully uh along the path of the story that you tell, but just tell us a bit about the main characters here.

[00:02:09]>> It's true. I do feel like I want to say there are jokes as well. It's you know, there are occasional It's not all doom and gloom.

[00:02:15]>> funny. It is funny, Claire. It's not all that bad. But um I think you described it really well. I my idea was to have this one family and you see them at two moments. So, exactly as you described, we'd see them in 1982 um when Maggie's a very young child, and we jump to 2022, this big 40-year gap, and there's a sense of who the family has become because of what's happened to them earlier. Um but also how, as with really I want to say all families, if not most, some sort of family secret or some crisis that's happened at some point has to be worked out. And some of the working out is how do you continue to live with that rather than, you know, it can't necessarily be fixed. Um but also I think the characters, particularly Heron, who's the dad that you described, um and his his daughter Maggie when she's a grown-up, they're thinking about, what do you do when the world has changed around you? So, I think the the tragedy, if you want to think of it in that in that way, is that Heron does what seems like the right thing in 1982.

[00:03:15]He does what he's advised to do. He does what everyone is is telling him is is the best thing to do for his daughter. And then, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40 years pass, and he looks around at the world and he also thinks, is that was that the right thing to do? Is that what I would do now? Um and that, in a sense, is the real struggle that they've got to work out. You can't go back in time, but you've got to somehow work out how to continue all the same.

[00:03:39]If people don't want to know anything about this novel and want to save absolutely everything for themselves, I think I would advise them to maybe go and make a cup of tea over the next couple of minutes, cuz I want to ask you a question about Dawn and Hazel. Come back in 5 minutes' time and it will all be fresh and lovely. Uh for people who are happy to know something about the story, let's just go for it. Because what you say about times changing around people is so poignant, because Dawn and Hazel fall in love, and they fall in love at a time where a court still views that as a bit of a crime, especially where children are concerned. And of course, times have changed now, but take us back to the 1980s and what was in everybody's not everybody's, actually.

[00:04:24]What was in the court's mindset at this time? Yeah, and it's it's sort of a It's a sense of kind of technicality.

[00:04:30]So, it's not that it's illegal for them to fall in love, but the problem is it's it's kind of incompatible in the court's mind and the mind of the judge that that Dawn could be a mother and a lesbian at the same time. So, it's kind of you can be you should be a mother, that's ideal. If you must be a lesbian, fine, but you really cannot be both that all at once. So, there's a scene in the novel where we see Dawn going She goes to pick up the family allowance from the post office.

[00:04:56]And I wanted that moment to be in it, so we see this is when she's kind of an authorized mother. The state is in a way, you know, supporting her, saying, you know, you're doing the right thing. The way that you look after your child is exactly what we want. And then almost the next thing we see is she's in in court and they're saying, well, but your influence on this child now will be dangerous. And the the kind of concerns that the the judges had in the real court cases was were really that the child would be bullied or they'll be um kind of psychologically harmed or maybe worse of all that they might also turn out to be gay.

[00:05:28]So, those kind of dangers meant that the decision in on in as you said earlier, in kind of 90% of those cases was that it would be safer and better if, especially with a very young child, that the father would get sole custody.

[00:05:41]And I will say that the difference in the book from the real cases is that in almost all of the real cases, once that father won custody, he didn't keep care of the child. He immediately transferred custody to his sister or his mother, to another woman, basically, [laughter] who could do the kind of looking after.

[00:05:58]And then that that mother had to kind of look on um for the rest of that child's life, often, at at what had been done to their family. Um there were people who made arrangements outside of the court because they knew this would happen and just made private arrangements. Um but it that relied upon you being in a marriage with a man who would allow that. So, it's a really it's a really tough um kind of bind that these women find themselves in. And these were cases that really happened.

[00:06:25]I've I've really been privileged to speak to women who are now, you know, grandparents who who lived through this in the '80s. Um and it's still really it's still really difficult for them to talk about and it's still really difficult for them to persuade people that it really happened. Well, this is the this is the incredible thing, Claire, isn't it? And in fact, Nick Hornby said the same thing, didn't he? He was chair of judges and the panel awarded you the Gold Prize at the Nero Book Awards. And and he said when he was reading it, he thought, well, the backdrop to this must have been actually the 1950s. Yeah. But it was the 1980s.

[00:07:02]>> Yeah, and you know, they these cases did go into the '90s, even. I mean, I would say that almost every person I've spoken to has said, "But I was alive then.

[00:07:10]>> [laughter] >> I didn't know this was happening." Um and I think that's the point, isn't it?

[00:07:14]That the the power of shame or the ability for a family to kind of cover up what happens if it's if it's if it's the the story that they don't want told, right? That's in a way what the book is about. Um and so, you know, there was a real moment when I was reading the for the research, I was reading the court case transcripts, and I was thinking, if a mother and father in a court arguing about this, I suddenly thought, who's looking after the child that they're fighting over? Because, you know, when you've got small children, it's endlessly who is looking after them and where are they?

[00:07:45]Um and I thought, okay, so I need to write a grandmother who is complicit in this, and I need to think of family friends. And suddenly you think the way it's kept a secret is that all of these people around them also are going along with the the lie, really. And I think that's the thing that's very um challenging for the character of Maggie is when she's older and she finds She doesn't find out about this until she's in her 40s. She's got a different story in her mind about what happened with her parents. And she has to kind of unpick then all of those trusted relationships from her childhood or when she was a teenager and think, God, all those other people knew and they kept it from me.

[00:08:21]Yep. Um you do a very clever thing with Heron, who is the the dad, Maggie's dad, in the book and Dawn's husband at the start of the book, where actually you you manage to portray him as somebody caught up in a system that is prejudiced, but he's also a victim in the end, too, isn't he? He's a slightly kind of almost an unwilling participant in what happens to him.

[00:08:49]>> I think so. I mean, people are a bit divided. There are anti-Heron people in the world, but my view is that he he's a good man who tries his best, goes along with particularly sort of authority figures who he feels have a a sort of their kind of experience and their professional expertise is what he should listen to. Um and he doesn't quite have the guts, I think, is is really If he if he's if he's if if he does anything wrong, it's that. He doesn't quite have the guts to do anything different. And I sympathize with that, because I think most of us would find it really difficult to really go against what we're being advised or to really be the one person who who who does the opposite. And I think he can't look 40 years in the future and say, "Oh, but by then, this will be no big deal, so I can be brave now." Um so, I wanted him to be a character who we could we could sympathize with on that level and also think we see him in the book doing everything he can to make it up to his daughter, to his grandchildren.

[00:09:48]He works very hard, I think, to you know, to take on that role of parent. He's He's He's He's He's doing his best by them all the time, but there's no way that he can really make up for this one thing that he's done. And for people who who are thinking, "So, what did she say his name was?" It's Heron. It's Heron, yes.

[00:10:06]As in the bird. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

[00:10:09]Um there are many, many light touches in the book as well, which I think is a as a reader we're very grateful for actually, because it is you know, it is quite a kind of heart-rending story that you're telling.

[00:10:21]Was that one of the joys of writing fiction, or are your academic papers littered with >> [laughter] >> I think more and more jokes were sneaking in there the closer I was getting to the door, maybe. I think that's how it was. But, um yeah, I think that's the that's the you know, that is the beauty of fiction, isn't it? That In a funny way, some of those bits are are kind of the the things that are closer to fact, because they're the things that you borrow from your real life, aren't they? They're sort of um you know, there are bits my my secret favorite character is Connor, who is Maggie's husband. And there's just he's just a kind of the the a lovely no one no one in particular.

[00:10:54]He's not modeled on anyone. But, just he does things like he makes an elaborate brunch when no one really wants it, but he just likes to show that he's the kind of man who would make an elaborate brunch when there's a when there's a crisis. And you know, those kind of moments are the things which are great fun to to yeah, to play around with. Was [snorts] the same prejudice shown by the courts to men who had left marriage and lived their true lives as gay men and and wanted access to their children?

[00:11:20]>> Mhm.

[00:11:21]It's it's a little bit a little bit harder to say. I think yes, but they were I think less likely in these cases to be suing for custody.

[00:11:28]Um I think yeah, certainly. And I I think equally a lots of arrangements were made to kind of cover up the truth of the way a family was breaking down.

[00:11:38]Um certainly I think in this case it was the real gap between, you know, the impossibility of kind of motherhood being these two things at once that people in that circumstance really kind of paid the ultimate price. Mhm.

[00:11:50]How delighted were you to win the award, Claire?

[00:11:53]>> [laughter] >> Oh, well, I was pretty delighted. Yeah.

[00:11:56]It was quite something for a debut.

[00:11:57]Yeah, it was a real and it was a real shock. So, I kind of at the moment that they announced it I was in the wrong part of the room, because I was casually waiting to clap and do a nice, you know, supportive face to whoever >> as well? No, I was I wasn't. I was actually the opposite. I was so nervous.

[00:12:12]I was kind of waiting for that to be over so I could finally get near a glass of champagne, so I wasn't. Um but I was waiting to see who won, and then I had to sort of um make the walk to the stage, and on on on my way rapidly write the speech in my head.

[00:12:26]>> Were you genuinely unprepared? I was I was genuinely. There is a video evidence, I think, which demonstrates the sheer shock and surprise on my face, which I'm not I mean, I'm not winning awards for acting. Let's put it that way. So, that was true. Yeah. And so, what changes in your world having written a novel that has been so well received? Are the offers flooding in? I think I mean, the main thing that's changed is I now do this as my real job, which is very exciting.

[00:12:55]Um and I think it's a sort of um permission, maybe, isn't it? To think, "Well, you know, you've written one, maybe you can go ahead and try and write another one." So, it feels like a sort of pass into the the next stage, which is to try and make it a a kind of ongoing career. And because you've written a novel that has at its heart a real story that you felt needed to be told, does that make it hard to choose the theme for the next novel? Do you feel confident enough to just leap out and go, "Okay, I'm just going to write a kind of character-driven novel, maybe about families or whatever." Yeah, I think what it does is it it makes me think maybe that's a that's for me a really good starting point, because those stories that are you know, it's kind of maybe a cliché to say kind of underrepresented, but that that feeling when you read in a novel something you think, "I did not know that that happened." Um for me, that's a really powerful starting point. So, I think I've got my next bit of history in the works. So, I've done all of the research bit, which is where I'm I'm I'm feel safe, but now I need to do the character part, as you say, and write the story around it. So, you've left the world of academia completely behind? I have I have, yes. Yeah. Sorry, I meant to do more regret in my voice.

[00:14:04][laughter] I I'm afraid I have.

[00:14:05]>> was no regret at all there.

[00:14:07]I I wanted to ask you about free speech on campus, and you'll still be able to have thoughts about that.

[00:14:13]I mean, how much did things change in your time? Tell us about your university academic experience.

[00:14:22]I mean, in terms of things like free speech, I think hugely. But, also I think in terms of student politics and and activism. So, I think, you know, in the almost 20 years or so that I was working universities, I think it became harder for students to do the ordinary kind of you know, the traditions of kind of protests and sitting in and going on strikes and all of those things which did make differences at least within individual institutions. I think students have become more anxious about that, too, and the kind of consequences.

[00:14:50]I think the the paying for your degree changes how you feel about university in general, and that sort of service relationship. Um but I think um yeah, where that power sits in terms of who should come to campus, um but also students feeling that it's their place. It should be that students are protected and that they are um safe there from, you know, there's a to my mind there's a kind of a very clear line between freedom of speech and you know, inviting harm to the people who that's their safe place.

[00:15:22]>> We should make clear which universities you have taught at and been a part of.

[00:15:27]Yeah. So, I taught at the University of Oxford and the University of Brunel University of London. Right. So, how how can you try and get to a place where the things that you've talked about do flourish again on campus? Because there are all kinds of pressures involved in the problems around free speech. You know, you can't shut down social media. You can't make students feel safe just by saying that world out there will never come onto campus. So, how do you manage it from here on in?

[00:16:02]I don't know, and I don't know that I'm the best person to to answer the question really, but I do think that there part of this is is a kind of a trust in students.

[00:16:11]Um but also it's a very difficult, because I think universities are anxious about um you know, kind of the the sort of the legal business of what it is that they're doing has changed, I think, or the kind of feeling of the corporate responsibility of a university, which I think is is changed over the last 10 years at least.

[00:16:30]Um So, yeah, I I mean, I think the university is is not in my mind a place that's separate from the real world.

[00:16:36]That's that's the point, isn't it? It ought to be kind of right at the center of it. Yeah.

[00:16:41]I mean, if you were a young person doing it all over again, would you choose to work in universities? Would you choose to even go to university?

[00:16:52]I would, because I have a kind of uh >> [laughter] >> idealized and evangelical view of universities all the same. I think for me, going to university I was the first person in my family to go to university.

[00:17:02]It changed my life.

[00:17:04]Um and I would choose to do that, and I would choose to um follow exactly the career path, but also because I think I wasn't a writer all the way through, and I really admire people who know that they're writers from a very young age, but I think another way to become a writer is to be a reader for a really long time. And if it doesn't feel like a debut novel, it's because all the time I was, you know, building up to it, I was reading all the time.

[00:17:30]Um and that is 50% of of writing. Yeah.

[00:17:32]I think it's just a lovely, lovely book.

[00:17:35]For whatever reason you choose to read it, just read it. That's what I would say. It's a family matter, and it's by Claire Lynch, and thank you very much indeed for coming in. Who is your favorite writer? Oh, goodness.

[00:17:47]May Maybe Claire Keegan.

[00:17:50]I would say. Yeah. Right. I don't like to pick favorites. It's nerve-wracking, isn't it?

[00:17:56]Yes, I can imagine it would. But, it's hard for a writer to pick a favorite [laughter] writer, yeah.

[00:18:00]Right. Thank you. Thank you very much, Claire. Thank you. Who's yours? I I couldn't pick. I genuinely couldn't pick. That's really unfair to ask me and then not say one, is it? I mean Well, I'm a [laughter] very unfair person, as Fee would Fee will testify. Absolutely.

[00:18:15]Uh who is my Well, I'm looking forward to the new Elizabeth Strout.

[00:18:17]May the 7th. Strong choice, yeah. Yeah.

[00:18:19]Thank you. Thank you for that endorsement. [laughter]