Diana Hendry

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

Freud pays tribute to her much-missed mother in her latest novel, in which a teenager is seduced by an unreliable sculptor in Soho, with tragic consequences

Esther Freud. Credit: Getty Images 
issue 12 June 2021
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  • I Couldn’t Love You More

    Esther Freud

    Bloomsbury, pp. 348, £16

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.

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