I really didn’t understand what I was buying here. This was a pop up Amazon suggestion and I clicked the button. I was expecting an interesting and well written family story, instead what I was reading was a searing indictment of the politics and law regarding lesbian mothers and the future of their children and the relationships they have with them. Right up until the 1990s the vast majority of lesbian mothers lost the legal custody of their offspring. Whereas courts, in almost all cases, placed young children with their mother, if she was in a lesbian relationship then this result was unlikely.
The story here is of a young married couple with a baby. The mother becomes involved in a gay relationship and eventually moves out of the family home, seemingly hoping all the time that the solicitor employed by her husband will see that small children need their mother. This fails to materialise.
Maggie, the baby, grows up with her father and an extended family, knowing that her mother left but never really being told why. Eventually, with a family of her own, she finds legal papers that fill in all the gaps in her own story. The author skilfully shows us the shifts in Maggie’s feelings, towards her father, towards the mother she doesn’t know and towards the law which in this case caused such grief and trauma.
The last 40 years have seen dramatic changes in the law, ones that have powerfully affected the lives of many people, depending on your political view, for better or for worse. In 1988, Margaret Thatcher’s government brought in the infamous Section 28, banning the acceptability of homosexual relationships within a family setting. This was finally repealed in 2003, closely followed by the introduction of civil partnerships in 2005.
This is a powerful novel, of grief and sacrifice and despair but also of love. It would be too dark without that.