 Welcome to the British Library. I'm right here inside our current exhibition, Unfinished Business, The Fight for Women's Rights, which you can still get tickets to for only to the 1st of August, so hurry up. All our events are still online and tonight we've got a real blinder for you. It's an exploration of the relationship between mothers and daughters in literature and also in society. Beyoncé said, My daughter introduced me to myself. Beyoncé wasn't available tonight, unfortunately, but wait until she hears about the writers who are joining us tonight. Gwendolyn Riley will be talking about her new book, My Phantoms. Sonia Fallero is talking about her latest work, The Good Girls, An Ordinary Killing. And Esther Freud is here to share her ninth novel, I Couldn't Love You More. She will be in the company of the broadcasting legend, Shyma Pereira. Over to you, Shyma. Well, good evening and welcome to this latest conversation as part of the exhibition being run at the British Library. I'm delighted to be with three fabulous writers. We are, of course, talking mothers and daughters tonight, which is probably just as well because all fathers and sons are out in pubs in groups of six watching tonight's football match. So greetings to all of you who've made it to join us. I'm going to kick off by asking Sonia Fallero about her book, The Good Girls, in which she creates a landscape that explains all of those external factors that affect the place of women and therefore often the behaviors of women and ultimately those impact relationships. Sonia, in The Good Girls, the killings that you are looking at are of a 14 and 16 year old who are found hanging in a mango field. Why don't you take it from there and just draw for us a picture of the different factors that affect the case. Yeah, yeah. Firstly, hi, Shyma. Thank you so much for doing this. Hi everyone who is watching and thank you very much to the British Library for hosting me. The Good Girls, An Ordinary Killing, is a book of true crime that investigates the hanging of two children who in the book I call Padma and Lalli. They were found hanging in a mango orchard very close to their homes one summer's morning in 2014. Padma was 16, she loved putting on makeup, she loved embroidery. Her first cousin and her best friend was Lalli who lived next door and Lalli loved romantic poems and daydreaming. These were kids like kids anywhere else, they went to school, they learned English and math, they liked to talk to boys, they liked to gossip. But because they lived in a conservative village, their lives could not be everything that they wanted and hoped. So they found themselves every single day coming in conflict with parents who adored them and wanted to give them modern things but could not really come to terms with the fact that modern things are not enough to allow somebody to live a modern life, for that you need modern ideas and a modern way of thinking. So Padma and Lalli studied and they studied at a private school even though their parents could have very well sent them to the free government school. Their parents could not read and write, their parents wanted them to educate themselves. Their mothers didn't know how to use phones but they allowed Padma and Lalli to use mobile phones, to send text messages, to chat with relatives. So there was this family in India that wanted the best for their children but because they felt that they were bound by rules that were completely out of their control, that they couldn't push back against, there was a simmering tension, a tension that came from believing that the country was run not by a constitution, not by a legal system, not even by politicians but by religious laws, by caste laws, by village laws. And if one stepped out of bounds then the impact could devastate not just the family but generations of families. And so Padma and Lalli who wanted to do something with their lives, they were looking at YouTube and they were looking at Bollywood films and they were dreaming big but they were made to feel as though they could not make any choices for themselves. They had to do what they were told because if they did something wrong then the family would pay the price and the price could be deadly. And this conflict ultimately leads to the hanging of the children which is what I investigated over a period of four years. And what I found was what I've spoken of before, this tension, a society that wants to move forward, that wants to be an economic superpower, that wants to take the table with all the modern countries in the world, but somehow still finds itself shackled to traditional ways that it's really too scared to let go off and those who aren't scared to let go find themselves held back by people at the very top. Because you know the power structure is works for everybody at the top and those at the top will not let go of their power easily. So it's really a story about love and power and control and what does it mean to be free and how can we allow our girls to be free in the world as it is unfolding today. Excuse me, the external factors that impact what happens in the aftermath of those killings include the politicians, the police, the caste system. It is a kind of, it's a tipping point of awfulness actually at which this happens. And what you see I think very clearly there is how hard it is to be successful as either a mother or daughter within that picture. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know the mums in this story adored their kids right and they gave them all these little secret freedoms that they wouldn't let the dads know about. So for example the most exciting thing that happened in the village area was this dinky little fair. You know it was a village fair, there was a little like there were shops and there was a ferris wheel and there was candy and all sorts of snacks. And Lully's mom very quietly behind her husband's back said, okay I know you're not allowed to do this but you've been a very good girl and I'm going to let you have the street. And it's fair to say that Lully's mom who had to have her husband's name tattooed on her wrist as a sign that she belonged, who was married off when she was 16 years old, who didn't see her husband until she was married to him, wanted to make sure that her daughter got to go out and got to enjoy literally the fresh air, you know. And got to see things that she knew that once Lully was married off she would never again experience. She wanted to take her child that she loved and let her out of the box because she knew that very soon as soon as Lully turned 16 she would be put back into the box for the rest of her life. So, you know, this is a story about mom saying, look, whatever experiences I've had, whatever I've gone through, I'm not going to let you go through that. You know, I want better for you and I understand what is better. And that's something that's really crucial to know, you know, is that people who haven't enjoyed freedom know what freedom means. And they know what it can do for you. And the moms in the story push back to let their children enjoy freedom. But when the children end up dead through no fault of the moms, no fault of the dads, just because of how life is, the moms are made to feel as though, you know what, why did you let them go out to graze the goats? Why did you allow them to walk into the other room with a mobile phone? This is on you. You know, and so this is a terrible cycle where people feel like their minds are opening up. But every time something goes wrong, as it is bound to because that is life, they are forced to step all the way back, and they are pulled back into the past. Thank you, Esther. This is you. I mean, that is, I think, a feeling that all the women in your novel, I couldn't love you more, are experiencing at some level the expectation of what they should be as mothers, the approbation for what they may have done or may not have done as mothers. And then the attempt, I suppose, for reconciliation at the end. But we're listening to Sonia speaking. It feels like it's very far away what we're hearing about. But actually, in your novel, you are very close to home. You're crossing England and Ireland. Just explain to me a little bit more about the context which I think many of us will recognise because we've been, our eyes have been open to it in recent years. And how many of the factors that we've just been hearing about actually are impacting us right here. Yes, gosh, Sonia, hearing you talk is so powerful and you spoke so eloquently about the subjects that I've been working with in felt like such a different context, but the overlaps are amazing. You know, power and society and love, mother-daughter relationships and responsibilities, everything there is sort of replicated in slightly different and quite subtle ways in my story, which you think on the surface is so different. So I decided to write initially about love, and I wanted to write about the way three women from three generations, grandmother, mother and daughter, from the same family experience love for their descendants, but also for the love partner in their lives. And I started to just just chronologically for ease, I sort of set it within my own chronology and took someone of my generation, my mother's and my maternal grandmother. And I started to really think about my mother, who was sort of the bonding person between us. And something that I've always known about her was that when she became pregnant at 18, a single mother, she kept that pregnancy secret. And again, with me when she was 20, again, she kept that secret, and no one in her family, her parents certainly didn't know that she had any children for quite some years. And the reasons were for all the reasons that you were expressing was that there was so much fear. She was fearful of the disapproval of her parents, but she was fearful of society and she was fearful of the power of the society and she came from an Irish Catholic family. And even though she had been brought up in London, or certainly was living in London as a teenager, her family had moved to Ireland to Cork, and she'd spent the last year or so of her education at a convent outside Cork. She knew, she'd heard whispers, she knew that to be pregnant and unmarried, or to be a bad girl, you could be punished very severely. I think most people in Ireland didn't really know what happened in a mother and baby home, but my mother knew that she did not want to find out. And that was really behind her reason for keeping the secret that she had any children at all. I think what's interesting, Esther, actually, is I've got a lot of friends who this time has gone by and they're all in their 50s, 60s, 70s, you know, are discovering children within their families that they didn't know existed. And now that we're all doing ancestry DNA and all of these other brands are available, you're suddenly being introduced to very close relatives that you that you were completely unaware of until these tests, because people have just been hiding kids away or giving them up for adoption. And I'm curious, you know, what makes me, what I find so shocking is that all of this stuff is happening on our doorsteps and we only had abortion introduced in Northern Ireland and in Ireland in 2019, you know, and we are not India. Obviously you had some understanding of that because of your mother. Was there anything new you found out which made you sort of think, goodness me, I didn't know that there was this sort of imposition on women? I found out so much. I mean, I have to say, for a lot of my life, when my mother sort of, she didn't go into it in great detail, but the understanding was was that she had been fearful. And when the film The Magdalena Laundries was released, she didn't want to watch that film and she said, oh, I was scared that could have happened to me. She wasn't saying it would have happened, but there was a fear about it. And I have to say, and this is so interesting for me in my research that I thought she was probably being a little dramatic. But when I did my research and I discovered the huge variation of girls from age 12 to women in their late 30s who found themselves in these homes, the sheer brutality of their treatment and the secrecy surrounding the home. So that once you went in, and often it was women who went to get help from the local priest, and they were promised, they were promised help. One girl of 15 was promised help with a pram, and they would find themselves there, and they would be asked immediately to change their name. They were told never to speak of anything personal to the other inmates. If there was a first pregnancy, they were referred to as a first offender. But the nuns also discussed among themselves that they needed new pregnant girls to come in because it was also a business. They needed them. There's an amazing account by a midwife who worked at Besborough, which is a mother and baby home. It's been in the news a lot recently, which is where I chose to set my book, the section of my book anyway, where my character ends up there. She overhears them on saying, at one point she's saying these girls, they've sinned, they've hurt God. But on another she's saying, we hope we have some more inmates soon because they were paid by the state, by the government to care for the girls. They were also paid for quite a lot of money for each child that was adopted, often by Americans. What the girls and the women often had no idea was that they wouldn't be able to take their child away with them when they left. They were sometimes asked to sign forms, sometimes during labour with the promise that they would then be given pain relief because there was no pain relief and no stitches and no after care because this was their punishment. And also no mother was allowed to go to her baby in the night, however starving, hungry or wet it was. The pain of what they were put through was all about punishment. And so I discovered a huge amount. It was chilling research. Thank you. Gwyndolin, now when we come to you, my phantoms is looking at a mother, but she's not visibly constrained or constricted or challenged by religious or political or social factors. But she's in this constant state of disconnect as if she doesn't quite know how she got there. And I wondered how did she get there? Hello. I think that's a question that Helen, the character of my book, would certainly perhaps ask herself maybe at two o'clock in the morning. She's such an avoidant character, she might not even do that. Certainly the choices that this woman has made have left her feeling really marooned. I suppose one of the questions of the book is how much those things were choices. And she has a very vexed relationship with societal expectations. And I wanted to do two things in the book, which was one of which was to show her as certainly a product of her time. So perhaps the worst thing that happens to her, she has a very happy childhood because after that everything is a disappointment. So she grows up as an expat with a father who had been a Spitfire pilot, and I don't know what's more glamorous than that. But then when she gets, when she's golden and she's adored, when she gets back to England, the wheels seem to come off a little bit. And so the book is told by her daughter telling her mother's life story. Obliquly. And we learned that the mother's great cry in her alibi was that she was always doing what people did, doing what was normal. So she moves to London and she goes to teacher training college because it's what people did. And it's the 60s and everyone's being carefree and wild. So she does that because it's what people did. It was normal. And that might sound great because here are all these new sexual freedoms and women were liberated and they could be educated and get jobs. But she was kind of sold a pup there because what do you know five years later she's married to somebody dreadful because getting married is what people did. She's got two kids she didn't want because it's what people did and soon enough she's back living with her parents and her life is a bit of a mess. So I wanted to show how one of these daughters then saw that mother and this sense of a woman who wanted attention, particularly male attention, but at the same time couldn't bear scrutiny. That's why she had all these defensive things she wanted to say it was normal. You had to do that. And a woman who wants to join in and blend in. Because that says a kind of security in that, but also a woman who knows that she's exceptional because she had such a happy childhood and why is nobody noticing this. I'm not as good as talking about it as I'm at right can I read a page. I'll read a page about that. Okay, so this is, if you if you don't want screws in there you shouldn't have kids because they look at their parents and they want to ask questions and they want to know why why why. So a lot of the book is about that the child asking why and then the teenager, slightly more aggressively and then the adult where this attitude is, if not curled then hardened. So this is a memory just a page I won't read much. I can't know what my mother was like at work. It's still hard to imagine or guess she maintained that she hated her job. Everybody hates their job bridge. She used to say everybody does. I remember after she'd retired. She told me that going into the office used to make her feel sick. Absolutely sick to my stomach. Yes. Why, I asked. Just wasn't me. She said frowning. It was the same with where we lived. That wasn't her either. She just wasn't a suburbs person, she used to say with a shake of her head. There she was in the house with the dark Bay window with the hydrangea bush by the bins that what my mother did or had done was what everybody did, or what people did was sovereign that it was normal. She pronounced that word with urgent emphasis. Other considerations didn't get much room. Her antipathy to her circumstances was no spur to change. I think it was the opposite in a way back then. My mother loved rules. She loved rules and codes and fixed expectations. I want to say, as a dog loves an airborne stick, for here was unleashed purpose, freedom of a sort. Here too was the comfort of the crowd and of joining in, of not feeling alone and in the wrong. So that's the attitude of the book is the daughter constantly questioning her mother, needling her mother in a way that is sometimes compassionate and sometimes not. But very, very female. I mean, we also see that in Esther's novel. And I have to say, you know, as I was listening to my older daughter, she was doing a podcast the other week and she was talking about me. And she said, you know, my mother likes to think she's my best friend, but the trouble is she's always given me unsolicited advice and she doesn't realise that and best friend doesn't do that. Which I found, you know, there I was, you know, sort of thinking I was doing pretty well on that. And it's, you know, and I just want to sort of leaven it for a second, you know, I remember my mother when I, my mother when I reached my 60th birthday, she's a 90 year old from Sri Lanka. And she said to me, darling, she said, you've done so well looking after your face. Now you're 60. Do you think you should give a little love to your body? Because of her size 22, which you can't see on the screen. But it's just, it's that really sort of difficult thing of managing parenthood. And what I find so interesting in all three of your books, which are so completely different and yet in many ways are looking at exactly the same thing is just the struggle to be a good mother and specifically to a daughter. And I wonder just going back to you, Sonia, because you're dealing with an actual story that, you know, you were investigating a story that unfold before you. What complexities you saw in the mother-daughter relationship where the mother herself may have to be silent or constrained or deliberately cruel to a child in order to protect it? Well, you know, one of the things that I found quite familiar was that the children were always crying and were always lying to their parents. And the reason I found that familiar is, you know, I was a teenager once and I was always hiding and always lying and building a life that was completely different from the one that I thought that from the one that my parents thought that I was living. And that was all right, because all my friends were also doing that. And that was simply a part of being a teenager. You know, I mean, it is a time where everything seems like a conspiracy, and that has its own fun and its own joy. And you don't really think about how your parents are going to react, and, you know, the trouble that you're giving them, and I can imagine that most parents are just waiting for, you know, they say that once you turn 19, things get back on track. Maybe my parents waited for me to turn 19. But, you know, the difference is that the Padma and Lalli felt not just that they had to hide and they had to tell lies because they were teenagers doing normal teenage things, but because they felt that if they didn't do that, they wouldn't have any joy at all. And this was despite knowing that their mothers were doing the best for them. The mothers faced a much greater challenge, which was simply to keep their daughters, well, not simply at all, which was to keep their daughters alive. You see, because they felt that if they gave their daughters too much freedom, if, for example, their daughters were seen doing something that was considered inappropriate, it was very possible that they would get into trouble with perhaps a village council, or that some men would take it upon themselves to snatch their daughters. Kidnapping sexual assault occur very frequently in many parts of India, and particularly in this state of Uttar Pradesh where this set of events took place. One of the ways that they kept their children alive was by keeping their children by their side all the time. And, you know, you would know how difficult that can be at a certain age when your kids are really trying to be away from you. They're just kind of embarrassed even to be seen with you. But while Padma and Lalli felt the same way, there was no escape for them. So their mothers, from the moment the children woke up to the time that they went to sleep, the mothers made sure that they were working. So they were cleaning the house, they were feeding the animals, they were grazing the goats, they were working in the fields, they were washing clothes, they were going to school. I mean, there is a directory of chores that those children had to follow every single day. And for them, that was simply how life was in the village. They didn't understand that there was a purpose to this immense labour that they were being forced to do. And the purpose was simply, my child must live to be married. Once she is married, she will be safe, because then men and the society at large will consider her something that cannot be touched. And if you cannot be touched, then you will not be raped, you will not be kidnapped, you will not be murdered, you will not be found hanging from a tree. So the purpose, a mother's purpose in a village like Katra Sadatganj was to keep a daughter alive till she was married off. And then the responsibility of life and death transfers on to the parents, the in-laws and the husband. But of course the children didn't know this and they pushed back because they were kids who wanted to live their best life and it ended in the worst possible way for them. Thank you. Esther, you will recognise again the themes that are raised there in that fear needing women to be married, needing them to have children within that because I couldn't love you more is very much about that. You don't spell it out explicitly, but it's there in everything that happens. You mentioned your mother and you've drawn on your mother before to colour the way you're thinking when you're writing a new novel. And I just wondered if there was anything you saw in writing your latest novel about the complexity. Were there any new complexities that you spotted in the mother-daughter dynamic? I mean, I know from reading your novel, for example, I was quite interested that the protagonist in my view, she's the sort of the modern character Kate, actually does struggle with her own daughter and I was interested in that. Well, it's so interesting, again, listening to Sonia, because, and I'll come to Kate in a minute and I really enjoyed looking at the sort of modern way of mothering that is so pressured. But I used my oldest narrator, Ifa, who is Rosalind's mother, and she looks back on her life and the way that she's raised her daughter and to keep her safe, she had to send her away over and over again. And that was just to do with the times that she was born. She was born during the war, Rosalindas was my mother, and she was evacuated in order to keep her safe. She was then sent off to a convent boarding school because the air in London, the bomb damage was such a dirty, unsafe and unhealthy place. There was rationing, whereas at the convent in the country, there was fresh vegetables and eggs, and they got an education, and her and her husband, who had been fairly poor, wanted their children to do better. They wanted them to marry and be safe, but they also wanted them to be educated and to have professions, and they did not want them to have babies as teenagers. And so it's kind of an inversion of, say, my own grandmother was the first person in her family to go on into education past primary school, and she wanted a much better life for her own three girls. And so I kind of played with that, but also I had a lot of fun with Kate, and I'm so glad you felt that she was the hardest one for me to create. It was interesting. I thought that would be the easiest, but it was so difficult between somebody who's terribly earnest and who's trying to be the best mother possible. She makes, you know, she doesn't just make breakfast, she makes pancakes. She twirls the pancakes. The pancakes have to land just the right amount of maple syrup. You know, when the child's board, she makes the three little pigs montage out of pasta, different shapes of twirls and curls and spaghetti for the roofs. But then, of course, because there's so much pressure and she's actually inside so deeply unhappy that often amidst this sort of perfect mothering, she completely snaps and shouts or screams or slaps her child. And I think anyone who's trying to bring up children in the way certainly my generation have, where they can't just go out into the street and or be sent away safely, or just be out in the park. I remember reading something so sad someone said, my children can see the park from their bedroom window, but by the time they're allowed to go there alone, they'll be too old to want to go. And it's like that. And I found it the thin line between Kate being sort of smug about how what a brilliant mother she is to being absolutely sort of desperate at the state of what parents have to do to prove that they are doing well at this impossible job. So I have to sort of opposites in a way and then Rosalina in the middle, who just gets caught up in all the new freedoms, like Wendley was saying of, you know, late 50s, early 60s freedoms, which are very tough on vulnerable young women and a lot less fun that they were made out to be. Well, I could imagine that when Freya will one day write about Kate, her helicopter mother, she will probably be I should think quite as icily microscopic in her remarks as Gwendolyn, a heroin if she is bridge. Before I go to Gwendolyn, let me remind everybody who's part of us, part of our event this evening that you can ask questions and give us feedback using the various kind of things around the edge of your screen. And you can of course buy all of these fabulous books online by the British Library while you're watching so keep your fingers busy and we'll keep our mouths busy. Gwendolyn, if I can come to you, you're with my phantoms, you microscopically look at this relationship between bridge and hen her mother Helen. And this is something that you do in all your novels you kind of microscopically look at people and their relationships and pull them apart and in first love there's a mother in that too that is looked at and what I wonder this is called my phantoms. When you look at all these phantoms across different types of social scenarios, there must be patterns what I wanted to know when you wrote my phantoms was, did you find different variations of the same patterns or were there some that were unique to the mother daughter relationship. I wonder, let me think the title I was I was quite pleased with. I thought it had lots of different meanings. I like the fact that it sounded so proprietary almost cozy. And I think that can be how it is with, you know, the things that haunt you but also the, you know, the things that haunt you and the people that you conjure in your mind, which may have no relation to the real people that you know how you sort of can build someone up in the book. There's a there's a whole section where every year Bridget has to go for mother for a for a sort of mother's day birthday slash meal just once every year. And she builds it up in her mind as being such a terrible event and feels herself getting so wrathful on the way there. And then when she sits down, of course, and sees the woman opposite her, what possible threat could this mild-mannered middle-aged lady be. But she's conjured her up in her mind to be this really terrifying figure. So that was one aspect of the title. The other one that of course they're my phantoms because I wrote the book, so they're mine. Patterns across society. I mean, there's something I wanted to show that aspect of how she was how both characters actually are shaped by the times they're in. But I also wanted to get at something slightly beyond that, which is just not it sounds a bit wafty, but the mystery of life, how mysterious everybody is and the sheer eeriness of these people. The strange decisions they make the people, the mother marries twice and they're both awful. Why does she do that? The daughter has this rage towards her mother. It's not clear in the book where that's come from. Where has that been conjured up from? So I really wanted to, as well as things that one could perhaps follow, a little bit of a breadcrumb trail in the book towards finding out what's going on between these two people, what's the real situation here. I really wanted to get at something that one could never know. That's that was something the title was sort of looking at as well. At the end of the book, it's not giving much away to say that Helen's life is over and how much her daughter will continue to think about her. I'm not sure if that's clear. Will this be something that over the years, will our relationship be something that over the years she begins to understand in a different way. I feel remorseful about what will it be something that's, you know, time goes by and it fades away. I hope that it sticks with the reader in a similar way, but I did want that to be beyond all the stuff about how the sixties and had to get married. I wanted that to be something that was quite eerie there. And I noticed when I was when I was editing it, I noticed that the word nothing comes up several times in the opening lines, which it also does in King Lear. So me and Shakespeare anyway, I thought that's interesting and then I brought it back in at the end when I'd noticed that there's lots of no. So there's something negative, there's something missing, there's something inexplicable there for all that there's lots of chat and references to this that and the other. I did want to that structure to be built over an abyss. Well, I have to say, you know, sort of looking at all three novels, both novels and Sonya's book about India, you know, it made me think, you know, I do have phantons, you know, my mother recently, and I didn't mean recently in the last six months, she told me that she once rang Barnardo's to see if they would take me. And she's also revealed that my father had a child she found out after she had married him by somebody else, but she has no details. So, you know, the phantons that we have are extraordinary. And of course, I can't get any more detail from her because she is that same generation as hen, which is that they tell you stuff, but they don't ever think about what does it mean. They're not analysing it. They're just giving you facts. And I do wonder in a strange way if that is cultural because my mother is from Sri Lanka. You know, there's a there's a kind of you just accept what's handed to you. You don't question it. And I think we see that in all three books. And what I want to move this on to is the sentimentalisation of motherhood, because actually what you have all shown in different ways is the complexity of motherhood. And I can't understand where we've got this sentimentalised idea, because when I think back, it wasn't an enid, like, you know, people were always in in boarding schools. And, you know, and it wasn't in the old Stratfield because they were always with nannies. So where did this sentimentalised idea of motherhood and the mother-daughter relationship come from? Sonia, I don't know if it actually exists in India, does it? Well, it does. It exists in mythologies and it exists in stories. But, you know, I do want to speak to what you just said, which was about women accepting their lot. I wanted to say that, you know, we all know that a lot of crimes against women and girls take place in India. But there is a very specific reason why the deaths of Padma and Lalli became front-page news, not just in India, but all over the world. And the reason is that when the children's bodies were found hanging in the mango tree, the women, the mothers of Padma and Lalli came forward, looked at the bodies, lost their mind and the men of the village came forward expecting the women to collapse in their arms and expecting that they would have to carry the women away. And that didn't happen. The women put down their bamboo sticks, which they always carry with them to the fields. They sat at the bottom of the tree and they said, you're not taking my children away. They said that to the men who were trying to take down the bodies to give to the police. They said that to the police who arrived shortly afterwards. They said that to the politicians and they said that to the media. They said that if you take down my children's bodies, you will make up a story about what happened to them because that is what the police in this country do. And I will never know why my children died. So these women who sit on the floor while men sit on chairs, who eat after men, who cover their face, who don't speak until they are spoken to, made this decision that no man, no powerful force is going to touch the bodies of their little girls until they got justice. So what was expected of them and how they presented themselves turned out to be two staggeringly different things that changed the course of what happened afterwards. And it really was a very important step forward in the women's rights movement in India because you're talking about women who don't read and write, who are not even allowed to step out of the house. And what is so poignant about all of this is that hours later when the women got what they wanted, which was, you know, the promise of a comprehensive investigation, and the bodies were taken down. It was time to take the children for bodies for a postmortem, and everybody went some other fathers went and the brothers, the politicians, but the women were not asked to come along. And when it was time to bury the children by the River Ganges, everybody went, including every media person from every part of the country, and the women were not asked to come along. And when it was time to mourn for their children, the women sat in one corner of the courtyard and just sobbed, not for a day for months. And you know, this is really what we don't talk about enough, which is that motherhood is also very lonely. You know, you have this immense love for your child, and you give your child everything that you possibly can, more than you have dreamed. But ultimately, for many mothers, and this is not just true of mothers in India or mothers who are poor, it is true of many mothers, is that motherhood is very, very lonely. And that is what came across to me very strongly while reporting this book. Well, it's funny, you should say that my mother was actually left by my father two weeks after we arrived in the UK and chose not to go back to Sri Lanka, although she could have, because she couldn't stand the shame. She couldn't stand the shame that it would bring on her father and the rest of her family. And she just felt it was better for us to live in one room, which we did for the next eight years, you know, free school meals, all of that. Because that was preferable to going back to the impositions, the cultural impositions, and Sri Lanka is actually quite unregulated compared to India, it's much freer, but even so. So that's a really interesting point that you're making, but it does make me wonder, Esther, really, are we forever going to be disappointed with the mother and daughter relationship? Because ultimately, there are so many unknowns from outside that impact the interactions between them. God, it's just so many points of possible discussion. And I think that when I wrote about Kate, one of the things I really tried to present in her story is just how lonely and isolated she is as a mother. And I experienced it myself and I, because I spent some of my childhood, as people know from Hideous Kinky, living in Morocco, where we were part of a sort of a city. And we ran free and we were eating outside where people worked outside where you were sort of almost felt like you were the children of the neighbourhood. And when I had my children and I was living in London and I came back from the park and I shut the door and I was alone with my children. And I kept thinking this isn't how we were meant to live. It's so difficult. They didn't want to just be alone with me. I didn't want to just be alone with them. And I really tried to give that to Kate that you've longed for children, or Kate has and I did, and you want it to be the sort of rich experience that you hope for. But it takes so long. I remember someone saying, it passes fast and very slowly. And all those things are true. But one of the things that struck me from what Sonia was saying was when I was researching my book, I came across the story of the Tuam mother and baby home, which has been in the news a lot recently. But in 1975, two young boys, they saw that in a cesspit, the lid had come loose, that there were clearly the remains of bodies. And the local priest was called and it was explained to the community that these were bodies from the famine long ago in Ireland. And the site was best and it was covered over. But a local historian, a woman called Catherine Corlys, she started to investigate. There was a mother and baby home just very near this cesspit. What were the conditions like? And she discovered that there was a huge amount of babies who died there. You know, the national death rate of children under five was pretty high, but this was way and above beyond that. And they are after years of her putting pressure, writing articles, trying to get people to listen and notice. They unearthed the cesspit and they found that there were 800 bodies or the bodies were children under three and that they had been put there. And there were no birth certificates. They were secret. They were hidden. No one was allowed to grieve. And when I went back to Besbra, the home outside Cork, there were shrines there with heart-breaking messages from women who were never told why their babies died, where they were buried, to this day they do not know. And now there's a plan for the order of the sacred heart to sell this land and they still don't know where the babies were buried and no one is telling. So it's just so interesting. The cover-ups and the people who are most likely, who need to know most, the women, the mothers, they are the least, the last to know. They have no importance somehow to the state. So there's many, many layers of this sort of secrecy and repression and also just the punishment of women for no other reason than being women. Just because you can, is what I really discovered into my sadness, much more than I actually had any idea of. Thank you. Gwendolyn, looking at the complexity of mothers and daughters, you haven't written about, I don't think, not in what I wrote of yours, the complexities of mothers and sons. But I wonder if that's something that you have thought about either artistically or just in an abstract way when writing poetry or writing prose. You know, because we know the relationship between mothers and daughters, and we think we do, we have our own individual experiences of that. And I think we must talk about the mother-daughter relationship because we differentiate it from the mother-son relationship. And I just wonder if that is something that you may have thought about and then dismissed as a subject matter, or that you have, you know, do you see it as different? I do, I haven't thought about it because I've got no imagination, so I probably won't write about that. Yeah, sorry, I could, I hear that question, I just saw it screeching towards the dead end of my not having thought about it. I have thought about the mother and baby, I'm at tomb, though. I read a wonderful long article on that which was accompanied by a poem by Paul Muldoon, which is the angriest poem I think I've read in my life. It's incredible. So everyone should certainly look that up. No, well, I find it really interesting. I'm just going to read a couple of comments in a second, but do keep your comments coming. You've still got a few minutes. I'm sorry that I've been a bit tardy about that, and of course keep buying the books, press the button, buy the books. And let us know, don't forget your feedback will still be passed on, even if we're not reading it out here. So this is just, it's just such a riveting stuff, but I do really, it's really made me think. Obviously, I have daughters, I'm a daughter of a single mother. And, you know, we're all talking about daughters. Sonia, let me just ask you very quickly in India, if you're the mother of a son, would you have any of this type of concern, or would there still be concerns just of a different set? If you're the mother of a son, you are treated well, you are given much more freedom because, you know, your view to somebody who has done your job, and therefore you deserve comfort and you deserve to be looked after. Whereas because people continue to pay dowries in a country that's very poor, they see women, they see girls as being a burden. So a mother of a daughter is viewed quite differently from the mother of a son. And also sons are given a ridiculous amount of freedom that genuinely makes no sense. So sons are treated like young men at a very young age and no doubt that comes with burdens, you know, no doubt that that means that they have to go out and work and do many things that is expected of their fathers. But they're also given freedoms that should not be given to anybody who is not an adult. And, you know, a lot of the problems that we see in India are also because of that. No freedom for girls and too much freedom for boys who are treated like men and therefore think that they have a right to certain kinds of behaviors that grown men who are responsible should be a responsibility. Should be allowed to do. So that really is a problem. There is an imbalance in how mothers of sons and daughters are treated and an imbalance of course in how the children themselves are treated. Absolutely. Well, we've got some comments and somebody has said some of the discussion has set the family unit at odds with society at large. Where is change or progress most likely to take root? I'm going to chuck that at you Esther. A very change or progress of most likely to take root. Well, I think it is about openness. And I think the fact that just by chance I started writing this book in 2015, which was the year that the report into mother and baby homes across Ireland. Not to say they weren't mother and baby homes terrible ones in England too, but this report was commissioned and it was published just earlier this year. And it has been very liberating. Now there's a request in this country in England for there to be an apology from the government for the babies that were taken from women because they weren't married. They felt the women were made to feel that the babies didn't belong to them, that they had no rights. And someone was asking me recently, what do you think? Well, obviously, yes, sorry. It's the most marvellous word saying sorry to my own daughter, which I have done so much has made our relationship. It has transformed our relationship. And she was talking about it the other day to do with this book in a way. But and she said, oh yes, however much we used to argue and I have to say, wow, no one has ever made me sort of so wild with fury as my daughter. When I said sorry, she said, oh, everything was okay again. So I learned and I think the generation before us. They had all sorts of expressions like a rod to break your own back or, you know, we must, we must, we must stand united against the bad behavior. But I found no, it's just say sorry. It's almost always your fault as the adult to say sorry when things get out of hand. And I think the government is what could possibly stop them saying that openness discussion apology. Well saying sorry, I think at any level is always difficult. And I've got a couple of messages or some feedback on my phantoms, which is why I bring up the word sorry hen doesn't use it. My phantoms looks deep into the taboo of not loving your mum or finding her so hard to love. How have readers responded for this. And while it's very funny in parts, painfully so, does this help the reader to like the mother? And do you, Gwendolyn, want us to like the mother? Like, no, not necessarily. I think there should be pity and compassion and understanding, but also, you know, a measure of what the daughter is feeling. I wanted to do a sort of 360 degrees of pain of how have readers reacted. I haven't heard from that many, I suppose, have I? I mean, I've had friends write to me saying can't wait to read your book and then I never hear from them again. But I think that happens to all writers. No, I had a text today from someone I hadn't heard from for years saying, oh, that's what are all our parents like that. You've written my parents and I thought my goodness, because when I was writing them, I thought this is a right pair. And I don't know, yeah, I'm glad that this person has noticed that because there really isn't any love between them. Sad but true, I was a bit boggled by a couple of reviews that sort of ended. Isn't this ultimately about love, because I thought, no, there's hostility and antagonism and something weird holding them together. You know, for the brief time that they do hang out together, but I thought no, not love. Why that is, I don't know, but that's that's the that's the great absence, I think in this in this book. Do you think it's because the rights of women, the status of women, the pill, all of these things have changed so rapidly women in the workplace equal equal opportunities that we are doomed to, you know, I don't know 100 years of mothers being in one very distinctly old fashioned to their daughters because everything around us is changing so much that we are inevitably being born in different ages. Yeah, I certainly yeah things things move, move a lot faster than they used to that's true. And I have friends now whose children profess to hate them and think that they're bigger to one way or another really quite violently even. I don't have children I've got a cat so I will not be subject to somebody turning on me in 1015 years time happily. But yeah, I mean I check off who plays a sort of minor role in the book as a check off play appears he was quite adamant that all a novelist or an artist had to do was correctly present a problem, the correct presentation of the problem rather than a solution. That's my get out clause is that I just I show the problem as accurately as I can and vividly inaccurately and anything beyond that is to be sort of be thought of afterwards once the book is being shipped. I think. Yep. Well I have to tell you actually I've got a lot of friends whose cats have turned on them so I wouldn't be so smart about it right this minute. I'm going to go to you to be very quickly for a final up some Sonya sorry I have been doing you in this order so I'll just continue as we're almost at the end. You also did a book about the bar girls of India and again a factual look at will we always have this situation where we have sort of naughty girls who are actually allowed and good girls who have to be virtuous beyond measure and be nothing in between. It seems like that sometimes doesn't it but I feel like India is changing very rapidly I mean it is in the middle of a very troubling transition. Right now it is transitioning from a democracy to an elected autocracy and of course when that happens, you know you're going to see the country become even more conservative even more violent, even more dangerous for women and for minorities. The situation is changing rapidly and not for not for the better. But having said that you know India surprises people and women in general. They're just. I mean you, you never know what you're going to get. So I'm always going to be optimistic because I feel I when I think about the mothers of Padman Lallee standing under the tree, saying not a word, and yet refusing to budge these tiny women. I just see strength, and I see enormous courage, and I also see loneliness and pain but I feel that as long as the women, as long as they continue to fight I think we're always going to have to be optimistic I am. Okay, well thank you Esther I know you said you've got three children now what I didn't ask was what their, their genders were but assuming that one is a girl. And you've been reading all of this stuff about young girls today who we've been bringing them up to, you know where what they like do what they like whatever are now getting huge numbers of intimate pornographic texts sent to their phones. As a mother does that make you think oh my goodness yes I am always going to have to differentiate in the way that I teach my children my girls to navigate the world and my boys. I haven't thought that I've actually felt more concerned about my boys. Interestingly enough, because the boys are in a very tricky position of trying to learn and navigate the difference between the sexes to discover intimacy, etc. And, and there's a sort of, there's a sort of paralysis of fear around communication between the sexes. And maybe it's because my, my youngest child is a boy and he's still learning and my, my older children are sort of more settled, and that includes my girl. So I've been very concerned about boys just recently and feel that first I was tremendously excited that the girls were taking this powerful stance of being open and saying enough and no more. But then I saw what was happening to so many boys, children of my friends, especially teenage boys who were literally being cancelled and ostracised everywhere for maybe things that they hadn't even known they'd done. And what do they do then. So it's brought up huge amounts of problems between the sexes just at the moment and I'm very fearful. I just can't see quite where it's going. Okay, thank you. Gwendolyn, you've got a cat really so I don't know where to take you on this for the last, for the last thing, but you know, did you love or did you hate Helen in your novel because that's what they want to know. Oh, oh, I don't know. I found her weirdly fascinating, or weirdly compelling, which is helpful when you're writing a book. And because a lot of the book is dialogue and I found that I had a voice in my head somehow so I could bang that out. I think I found her compelling in a similar way that her daughter does, which is part terror thinking, could I end up like that? Part sort of the fascination of something that you want to poke with a stick to see what it does. And part incredible pity, because as the book goes on and this is a woman who wants she wants to join in with life. She's like rattling the handle on the door saying let me in. And yet she keeps hurling herself at situations where she's humiliated. So I know I was writing it, but I was, I was quite fascinated by her. Did I like, I quite liked it. She certainly got spirit. To say that I liked her. She reminded me a lot of my own mother and I'm just going to finish really by just saying one thing that my mother said recently, all of these things she said recently, I never listened to her before I don't think. And one of my friends said, you know, I bet Sharma has always kept you on your toes and my mother who's as sharp as a tap turned around said on my toes, she's kept me on my knees. The mother-daughter relationship continues to be complex. Let me remind you everybody. This is the Good Girls by Sonia Fullero. This is I Couldn't Love You More by Esther Freud. And this is My Phantons by Gwendolyn Riley. The Unfinished Business exhibition is still running at the BL. So for goodness sake, get there fast. Thank you, Sonia, Esther, Gwendolyn, and good night to all of you.