Claire Lynch: "They thought that if they took the children away from their mothers when they were very young, they would do less harm to them."

BarcelonaClaire Lynch's (Dartford, England, 1981) debut novel is one of those books destined to find its way through word of mouth. In fact, A family matter It is not even a year old and already has half a dozen translations (in Catalan it is published by Edicions del Periscopi, translated by Núria Saurina and in Spanish by Literatura Random House). A family matter It's as delightful to read as it is infuriating. It deals with great literary conflicts—love, loyalty, freedom, family secrets—but embedded within ordinary lives, with the trivial and harmless familiarity of very human and imperfect characters, and with a deceptive literary simplicity that poses moral dilemmas to the reader.

The book starts from a fundamental problem: a woman who, as a young woman, married a man and became a mother because she didn't know she could aspire to have "a story worth telling."

— Dawn's life had been small, very limited, but also very peaceful. She married right after finishing her studies and was happy with her life. Hazel's arrival in this life, in this small town, opened the door to a place she hadn't had the chance to imagine.

He will fall in love with a woman and decide to separate.

— Much of what happens in the book stems from the lack of a plan. Dawn doesn't know what to do next. People are improvising solutions. Sometimes they work, but most of the time they create another problem we didn't know we'd have.

Dawn knows she loves Hazel because of "the way she transformed the air as she walked by." She builds from the intimacy and details of everyday life. Do great stories come from small things?

— The great stories of this world also happen in small towns or within a family, between any two people in this world. I wanted that moment between Dawn and Hazel to be as grand and dramatic as possible, but at the same time, almost insignificant, something no one else would see. I'm also aware that part of the book is about exposing and shaming two people for their relationship—when prosecutors or judges talk about their relationship, which takes away all their privacy—so when we see them as readers, I wanted them to be protected, I wanted the kind of perfection of what happens between them to remain just between them.

It's surprising to discover that in the 1980s and 90s, 90% of lesbian mothers who separated lost custody of their children for being considered bad influences. For heterosexual mothers, it was normal for children to stay with their mother before the age of six. This was not the case for lesbians, whose children were often taken away.

— For me too! It was like a revelation. It outraged me, and at the same time made me feel both sad and fortunate. I had this very strong feeling of thinking: this might have been my experience if I had been born several years earlier. I felt like I had dodged a bullet, that I had been spared that experience, and that the life of absolute comfort I have now is very different. Once I understood this, I had to see that project through to the end.

The phrases that appear from the trial between Dawn and Heron for custody of their daughter are taken from real cases.

— The rest is fictional, but when I had to explain what happens inside the courts, I couldn't imagine a more shocking, more hurtful, more devastating way to say these things. The judges thought that if they took the children away from their mothers when they were very young, they would do less harm, because the father could meet someone new and the children would hardly know their mother ever existed. I decided to use real words because it gives this part of the story a different foundation. I'm a big fan of history, but with history there's a certain distance, whereas fiction forces us to live inside the lives of those people, and it's almost like a moral test. It forces us to ask ourselves: would I have done the same?

The book is structured in two time periods, 1982 and 2022, coinciding with his biography. It also spans from the Thatcher era, when laws were enacted prohibiting the teaching of same-sex families, to the decades of greatest progress in LGBTQ+ civil rights.

— It's not my life, but it coincides chronologically because it was easier for me to imagine scenes from Maggie's childhood and the present day. I think it's possible to associate a theme with silence, with shame. Underlying all of this is the AIDS crisis and other factors that made it possible, in those years, to say: look, if we don't talk about this, it will disappear. And here I'm a bit torn between giving you a very serious answer or the one I would say Taylor Swift: "Shade never made anybody less gay"[Darkness doesn't make anyone less gay]. What's interesting about this era is that the characters have witnessed the social changes that have surrounded them, and their children and grandchildren will have a very different attitude toward gender and sexuality. There's something very tragic about Dawn having lived through these changes, but no more than she had imagined, yet she's had to pursue a life she should have had from the start."

The novel addresses two powerful stigmas: homosexuality and being a bad mother.

— Because they were two incompatible things, in 1982: if you wanted to be a lesbian, be a lesbian, but you couldn't also be a mother. Forty years later, Maggie also feels she struggles to fit in, feels limited by marriage, in her career, as a mother. Both feel overwhelmed by the pressure of what they are expected to be, of what everyone assumes, and have no space to imagine what they want to be.

The father tells the girl that her mother has abandoned them. Can a healthy family be built on a lie?

— It's the big question: can anything good come from a false premise? Families are very complicated, sometimes. Everyone has done something for which, in retrospect, they must bear the consequences for the rest of their lives. The paradigmatic case is the father. I try to acknowledge Heron's good intentions, the merit of wanting to protect his daughter and trying to do the right thing, but at the same time, he squanders every opportunity he has to tell the truth. And when 40 years have passed, it's as if the truth has been lost as well, and for him, it's almost impossible to go back. It seems to me that the book, at the very least, suggests that there is hope, but sometimes patience is needed; you have to wait a long time for all the difficulties to lose their power. The life I imagine for the characters after the book is only possible because so much time has passed.

One of the irresolvable dilemmas it raises is: where does a mother's freedom begin in relation to her love for her children?

— It's easy to say Dawn is selfish and chooses her passion. But she has no other choice. Simply by allowing herself to feel desire, she has no escape. What's lost is the blanket around her neck. If the legal requirement is expulsion from her daughter's life, all that remains is the need, and the courage, to rebuild some alternative life that can save her.