I couldn’t love you more by esther freud

the times literary supplement 15 july 2021

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?” Anyone familiar with the Ireland of the 1960s will be able to imagine exactly what the answer might be, and Freud doesn’t stint on the misery when describing the experiences of the teenage Rosaleen Kelly at the Sacred Heart Convent. Despite the familiar territory, Freud handles it all with great sensitivity; her research is thorough, including the detail that it was common for women in such homes to be denied pain relief during childbirth so that they could better remember their “wickedness”.

Chapters move between the story of Rosaleen in the 1960s, of her mother, Aoife, who narrates the tale of her marriage to her unresponsive husband as he lies on his deathbed, and of Rosaleen’s daughter Kate, in 1991, an artist who was adopted and is now attempting to trace her birth mother. Kate has an alcoholic husband and a death- obsessed four-year-old. Contemplating a dismal weekend, Kate reflects: “The choices are stark – kill myself, or glue pasta on to card”.

There is an unfinished quality to both Freud’s prose and her plot – it is not always easy to hold on to the different threads of the story, and this lack of clarity isn’t helped by Kate frequently imagining that she sees her birth mother in the street. On occasion, Freud appears to be straining for poetic effect – characters say things “quiet”, rather than “quietly”, for example – but this is often distracting. For all Esther Freud’s psychological acuity, the writing is too frequently muddy and the story too predictable for it to have its desired impact.

This review first appeared in The Times Literary Supplement