Join us to hear Claire Lynch talk about her incredible debut novel, A Family Matter, a story of a family torn apart by secrets and based on the author's research into real life events.
It’s 2022, and Heron has just had the sort of visit to the doctor that turns a life upside down. He’s an old man, stuck in the habits of a quiet life. Telling Maggie, his only daughter, and the person his life has revolved around for so long, seems impossible. Heron can’t tell her about the diagnosis, and he can’t tell her all the other things he’s been keeping from her all these years either.
It’s 1982, and Dawn is a young mother – just beginning to adjust to life in her husband’s house rather than her parents’ – when Hazel breezes into her life like a torch in the dark. It’s the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly life is more complicated, and more joyful, than she ever expected. But Dawn has responsibilities, she has commitments: Dawn has Maggie.
Claire Lynch is part of a two mum family, and wrote this sharp, unputdownable novel, after looking into what her life could have looked like at another time. During her many hours of research she discovered the experiences of lesbian mothers in the UK in the 1980s, and the case studies she uncovered formed the basis for this novel – the fact that in the 1980s in the UK, 90% of the mothers who were found to be lesbians in divorce cases from their husbands lost all legal custody of their children. She has also written a memoir, SMALL: On Motherhoods, published in 2021.