Review of A Family Matter by Claire Lynch

Claire Lynch's novel shapes two timelines separated by decades into an engrossing, complicated family story of forbidden love, secrets, impending death, and second chances, against a backdrop of everyday minutiae. I read this in a day; I loved it.

In Claire Lynch's novel, we track a British family along two timelines. In 1982, Dawn, a young mother in a fine but loveless marriage finds happiness in a socially unacceptable relationship, and the legal backlash causes her to lose custody of--and contact with--her beloved young daughter Maggie.

In 2022, Heron, Maggie's father, has just received terrible news about his health, and he works to come to terms with it within his carefully prescribed daily routine and regular banal conversations with Maggie and family.

It becomes clear that Maggie is unaware of the particular circumstances around her parents' divorce and the reason for her mother's subsequent disappearance--until a clean-out of her childhood home reveals long-held secrets.

Delving into the past allows the reader to witness the slow, lovely unfurling of Dawn. She is a young mother who had met a nice guy and followed the prescribed steps of the time: marriage, having a child, doing the washing, cooking meals, her inner self icing over as she went through the motions. When she meets Hazel, everything in her life is upended. She doesn't dare to hope for this love, this happiness, this fulfillment...until she is brave enough to begin to imagine a life that feels bright and full. We are simultaneously immersed in Dawn's adoration of her daughter Maggie: every expression, every finger and toe, every thought, every laugh.

Dawn's naïvité is heartbreaking, as society in that time and place aggressively fights departures from the norm, and she is punished more cruelly and fully than she could have imagined. Heron's embarrassment at being left is bolstered by the outrage of the family members and legal representatives who insist upon the strongest repercussions for Dawn. It's enraging to watch him pretend to be buoyed along and tell himself he has no real power--when he had the chance to preserve his family in a newly imagined form.

In the modern timeline, Heron's state of dying adds a layer Maggie's complicated emotions upon her discovery of her mother's years-long attempts at having contacted her--and her mother's eventual resolution decades earlier that leaving Maggie alone was best for her daughter. The acute mother's love Dawn feels for Maggie, which we witnessed early in the book, is a ghost, particularly heartrending to recall when a long-due reunion ultimately occurs after countless lost years.

I read this engrossing family story in a day and can't wait to read future fiction by Claire Lynch.

More about Claire Lynch and Family Stories

Claire Lynch is also the author of Irish Autobiography and Small: On Motherhoods.

For more family stories I've loved, check out the books at this link.