Meet the disposable family

The Stepmother’s Diary, by Fay Weldon

‘These modern, all-inclusive families of ours, created by the passing sexual interest of a couple in each other … can give birth to chaos’, observes Emily, a promiscuous north London Freud- ian analyst and mother of Sappho, the stepmother of the title. The novel begins when pregnant Sappho, on the run from her older, widowed husband, Gavin, thrusts a bag bulging with diaries and fictionalised autobiography into Emily’s hand. ‘Please don’t read them’, says Sappho. Of course I meant to read them, Emily silently tells the reader. I am a mother, and have my daughter’s best interests at heart.

One wonders in this book whether any character is capable of having the best interests of anyone else at heart — indeed, do any of them have a heart at all? To be benign is to be impotent in Fay Weldon’s world; any willed act equals harm. The device of the unreliable narrator is taken to extremes. Emily, the first narrator, has based her life round a central deception; Sappho’s father, Rob, committed suicide, but she told Sappho he died in an accident. In concealing the truth, did Emily seek to spare her daughter’s feelings or extract the maximum from her insurance claim? Emily has made over the family house where Rob died to Sappho; an act of generosity or a curse, given that the house is tainted by the death?

The Stepmother’s Diary is all about scripts. Emily believes that people script their lives to suit their desires. ‘Sometimes people mean what they say’, protests Barnaby, her relatively benign — and impotent — would-be lover. ‘Very seldom’, Emily replies. Sappho started as an actress, but soon found that

I’d rather write the lines than say them.