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A Family Matter

Questions About A Family Matter

by Claire Lynch (Goodreads Author)

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Answered Questions (2)

Heron thinks he's a good man, but is he really?
Dani Does he? He doesn’t go around shouting about it, if he does. I think he thinks he is a ‘good enough’ man, who has done his best (a lot of which worked…moreDoes he? He doesn’t go around shouting about it, if he does. I think he thinks he is a ‘good enough’ man, who has done his best (a lot of which worked out very well). The fact that he finds it hard to tell Maggie the truth about her mother (and didn’t do this decades earlier, when she was already well and truly grown up), and has kept all those newspaper clippings about similar cases and pronouncements, suggests that he knows very well it’s not that simple. The way Connor and Maggie’s relationship is portrayed shows many parallels with that of her parents, which to me indicates that Lynch blames ‘the time’ rather than Heron as an individual. Connor and Maggie are not very different from Heron and Dawn, but that was then and this is now. Society at the time told Heron he should shield his daughter from her mother and all the neighbourhood wives praised him to the heavens for bringing Maggie up and keeping the house. Meanwhile Dawn was being told she was a damaging influence and should stay away. Were either of them bad people for not fighting back harder? We are all just human, muddling along in the world, trying to do our best.(less)
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Why wasn't Dawn there the minute Maggie turned 18 & could make her own decision based on the truth?
Dani Hold on, there’s a parallel question that is much harder to answer: why didn’t Heron tell Maggie the truth at any point in the last decade or two, whe…moreHold on, there’s a parallel question that is much harder to answer: why didn’t Heron tell Maggie the truth at any point in the last decade or two, when society was changing and he too may have seen two lesbians pushing a pram in real life, with it no longer being the punchline to a joke from a previous era? This compounded the situation, effectively depriving Dawn of a relationship with her grandchildren, his grandchildren of a relationship with their grandmother, and Dawn and Maggie of a reconciliation at a much earlier point in their adult lives. Yes, Heron’s personality and need for rules and order was a significant factor
in the eighties and nineties, but I find his continued silence around the time the grandchildren came along harder to understand.

Why Dawn didn’t turn up on Maggie’s doorstep fourteen years later is kind of answered within the book: in the early 1990’s women in Dawn’s situation in the UK were still losing their children to their ex-husbands (even while the number of women having children within lesbian relationships was increasing, possibly limited to larger towns and cities such as London and Brighton). She was deeply traumatised by the break with her child (experiencing bouts of mental illness), believed that her daughter would come of her own accord soon enough, and did not want to risk further damage (to herself/her daughter/the mother-daughter relationship) by turning up unannounced and possibly unwelcome. This was a time when people found it much much harder to confidently feel (and publicly act on the idea) that a judge, of all people, was talking BS. Pre-internet, it was much easier for for authority figures to maintain their authority.(less)
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