The springboard for Esther Freud’s eleventh novel comes from her own life – as it did for her debut novel, Hideous Kinky (1992), which told the story of her childhood adventures in Morocco with her mother and sister. This time around, Freud has drawn on her mother’s concealment of her pregnancy with her first child, Freud’s elder sister Bella. Bernardine Coverley – Esther Freud’s late mother – became pregnant at eighteen by the artist Lucian Freud and kept this a secret from her strict Irish Catholic parents. Even after Coverley had a second child with Freud, she decided not to tell her family. The first her parents heard of their grandchildren was when a relative wrote to tell them she had seen their daughter waiting at a bus stop with two small girls.
I Couldn’t Love You More is, as Freud writes in the acknowledgements, “a response to the idea: what would have happened if she’d been found out, or if she’d asked for help from the wrong people?”
