Mothers and daughters: I Couldn’t Love You More, by Esther Freud, reviewed

A new novel by Esther Freud — her ninth — raises the perennial but always fascinating question about the use of autobiography in fiction. Since her first novel, Hideous Kinky, Freud has frequently used an underpinning of autobiography, but mostly it’s been discreet. You didn’t need to distinguish what was life, what fiction. But with I Couldn’t Love You More the auto-biographical element has become overt and somehow obtrusive. Freud’s previous novel, Mr Mac and Me, concerned with Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s stay in Suffolk at the start of the second world war, is on the cusp of being an historical novel. This one is close to autofiction.

In the acknowledgements, she pays tribute to her ‘much-missed mother’ who at 18 ‘found herself pregnant and unmarried’.The idea for this novel is based on Freud wondering what would have happened to her mother if, like so many young women, she had ended up in one of those notoriously cruel Irish Catholic mother and baby homes.

So far, so good; or so awful. But it was disconcerting to read, pre-publication, an essay in the Guardian in which Freud gave a fairly fulsome account of her mother’s real life story, explaining that at 17 she fell in love with the painter Lucian Freud and went on to have a second child with him. Somehow it becomes almost impossible to read of Rosaleen, the fictional stand-in for Freud’s mother, out in the bohemian wilds of Soho, falling in love with the sculptor Felix Lichtman without immediately substituting him for Lucian.

I Couldn’t Love You More (the title’s ironic) is a mothers and daughters novel. There’s Aiofe, the Irish granny on her farm in County Cork (more biog), her daughter Rosaleen, an innocent in Soho who ends up scrubbing the floors of the Sacred Heart convent, forced to give up her baby; Kate, an artist searching for her birth mother, and Freya, her death-obsessed daughter.