I Couldn’t Love You More

By Esther Freud

From her first novel Hideous Kinky, Esther Freud has been writing about mother-daughter relationships. This book chronicles three generations of women: Aoife, Rosaleen and Kate. Rosaleen’s relationship with sculptor Felix Lichtman initially feels like liberation from the restraints of a backwardlooking Catholic Ireland, but it ends in betrayal and abandonment. Freud takes a kaleidoscopic approach, shifting time-frames and points of view, so the start of the book requires concentration. At heart are the pressures of the Church and bad priests on unmarried mothers, their treatment by nuns and the consequences for the shamed women and their babies. Freud’s own mother escaped this fate, simply by not going back to Ireland after her pregnancy began to show.