From parents who meddle in their children’s relationships to ex-wives who loom over second marriages, families in fiction can be just as complicated as they are in real life
Uncomplicated, happy families are not to be found in most books – no more than in most homes. Family life is messy. Try getting several people into a car, or through an airport, and you’ll know how quickly family drama can escalate. And these are supposedly the easy bits. What about when there’s real trouble?
I’m drawn to stories of families under pressure, from without and within. In my story collection Shine/Variance, there’s a father smiling his way through a crisis while Christmas tree shopping with his son, a daughter pretending there’s nothing wrong with her mother, brothers and sisters realising who their parents really are. In my stories and this selection of books, we find families pretending everything is under control, when the reality is nobody knows what they are doing. All families make it up as they go along, in the hope that they’ll hold it together.