BEST BOOKS FOR...
WHEN YOUR CHILDREN LEAVE HOME
THE author and broadcaster suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life MY ELDEST daughter moved out six months ago, and I still have to remind myself not to lay a place for her at mealtimes.
I am, of course, delighted that she is starting a new independent life, but there is a tiny, irrational part of me that wants her to stay at home for ever. Luckily, I still have a teenager who has made it her mission to remind me of the disadvantages of living with your children.
When she finally goes to university I wonder if I will follow the example of the heroine of Sue Townsend’s hilarious novel, The Woman Who Went To Bed For A Year. After her gifted twins leave for university, she goes to bed for an extended spell of me-time while her husband lurks in his garden shed, wondering who will make his lunch.
She becomes known and is seen as a symbol of unappreciated womanhood everywhere. Townsend is a wickedly funny writer, but the book has a serious point about the need to reinvent ourselves when the nest empties.
The narrator of the Diary Of A Provincial Lady series by E. M. Delafield, set in rural Devon in the Thirties, faces the same dilemma when her daughter decides to go to boarding school.
Unsuited to a life of flower arranging and charity work, and perennially short of money, she ignores the pessimism of her nice but boring husband and starts to write. She finds fame, money and a flat in London, but also finds a way to cope with the problems her change in status brings to her marriage.
The state of the property market means there are women who would like the house to themselves, but find their adult children can’t afford to leave home.
Eve and Russell, the parents in Joanna Trollope’s Second Honeymoon, are looking forward to their last child flying the nest, but their plans are frustrated as one by one they come home to roost. As Russell says in deep frustration: ‘End? Does parenthood ever, ever end?’
Trollope is a brilliant observer of the complicated recalibration that goes on as your children become adults yet revert to being children the moment they come ‘home’. As for me, I’ll go on laying a place at the table, just in case.