Debuts of 2025, Volume 2: Claire Lynch
Lauren Brown is a writer and journalist originally from a working class background in the north-east of England.
Her debut memoir, Hands:
...more
Claire Lynch’s debut novel, A Family Matter, explores a father-daughter relationship between the 1980s and the present day, as they attempt to speak what has been unspoken for many years.
Lauren Brown is a writer and journalist originally from a working class background in the north-east of England.
Her debut memoir, Hands:
...moreClaire Lynch’s debut novel, the remarkable A Family Matter, began, first and foremost, as a desire to explore a father-daughter relationship. “I’m from a generation where you would ring home, and if your dad picked up the phone he would say: ‘I’ll get your mum,’” Lynch, a university lecturer and author of the memoir Small: On Motherhoods, laughs.
She wondered: “If a father and daughter had been alone through all of an upbringing, what would that be like, and how would that have changed once [the daughter] was a mother herself? So then I thought: ‘Where is the mum? What happened in this family?’”
Much of the dual-timeline novel, set between the 1980s and close to the present day, explores the relationship between Heron and his daughter Maggie. In the chapters set in 1982, Maggie is a small child and her mum (and Heron’s wife), Dawn, is present and forging an irresistible connection with Hazel; in 2022, with Heron an elderly man and Maggie a wife and mother herself, it is clear that Dawn is no longer in the picture.
It was as Lynch was “working through different possibilities” of her story that she “stumbled upon this history” – that in the 1980s in the UK, around 90% of lesbian mothers in divorce cases lost legal custody of their children. “The more I read, the more I thought of how many families it must have affected. I felt I had to do it justice,” she explains, outlining that she “read everything”, including court documents to “hear what people were saying”. “It was interesting the way the judge would sum up; the language of that,” she says. “I wanted to try and get a sense of how these decisions were justified at the time.”
The relationship between Maggie and Heron is strong, if unusual to those on the outside; they have nightly phone calls in which Heron “told her everything [...] all the little details in his day, his current thoughts and theories”. Yet there is much they do not, and do not know how to, talk about, and as Maggie seeks answers and Heron works out how to tell his only daughter about his diagnosis and about all the other things he has been keeping from her, they must try to traverse the many years of the unspoken.
Among what is most striking about the novel is the tenderness with which Heron in particular is written, despite the separation of mother and daughter he played a part in. “I set myself a ‘no bad guy’ challenge,” Lynch explains. “I wanted to explore how difficult it is, or would always have been, to break away from expectations and be the outlier who takes a completely different position.
“It’s tempting, isn’t it, to say there were villains who had these extreme views. But, actually, the more unsettling thing is that it’s often people who are doing things out of love or doing things out of their best intentions. And that’s the thing that can also be harmful. It’s probably unrealistic for somebody to completely transform into this radical, open-minded person 40 years later. But I think that someone who has been always trying their best, and what is acceptable has been evolving around them, and they’ve evolved slowly with that
too – that’s, to me, a more realistic, and quite a painful thing to watch. For that person to have gone through something where they think: ‘Oh, God, maybe I wouldn’t have done the same thing now.’”
Lynch set out writing something that would “feel really like a historical piece” but notes that, as in the UK edition, international editions will also be including an author’s note outlining the historical context – and “sometimes it’s even more recent”. Lynch explains: “In Germany, it was into the ’90s. In Italy, it’s similar. In fact, in Italy, the law is going backwards, and non-birth mothers and lesbian couples are having their parental rights taken away. It’s scary.” Nevertheless, Lynch was “hugely conscious” of the novel being hopeful.
“It’s a difficult balancing act. I felt a responsibility to be really clear about what happened historically and to make sure it was clear that this is real. But I also didn’t want to fall into that trap of making all queer history seem completely bleak.” The end of the novel, therefore, “was really important to me, to think there’s more to come”.
“We don’t get to see it,” she explains, “but we do have a sense that it’s going to be redemptive. We know there’s more to come in reconnecting that family. It’s like, in one way, life can completely fall apart in a series of a few months, and then 40 years later, it might be put back together again.” As for what she wants to write next, Lynch says she is continuing to explore “women’s histories that are not even really in the footnotes”.
A Family Matter, Chatto, 29th May, HB, £16.99, 9781784745837
