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We Don’t Always Like Our Children
How love isn’t irrevocably connected to our personal preferences
Many years ago I was driving down Highway 101 in Marin County, California while listening to National Public Radio in my vehicle. They were broadcasting their weekly interview in which an National Public Radio journalist would talk to a well-known author.
The previous week they’d had an award-winning British writer on the show. Unfortunately the NPR journalist had asked merely banal and tedious questions, so by the third question the author had lost his patience with his NPR hostess. When she’d asked her fourth stock question the writer had replied, “I think a far more interesting question would be…” and proceeded to supply both the question and his answer.
The following week another British author, Mary Wesley, was on the show and she must have heard the previous broadcast because she likewise was answering her own questions in lieu of anything interesting from the NPR journalist. She began to talk about the recurring theme of families and fragmentation in her novels. I was particularly struck by her comment, “We always love our children, but we don’t necessarily like them very much.”
I knew Wesley’s work, having appreciated her first novel (written at the age of seventy) Jumping The Queue, which combined mordant wit with a perceptive insight…
