Diana is not the kind of mother who wants her children to be happy. She would rather they faced real hardship and became wise and resilient. It’s an admirable philosophy, but maybe not so easy to admire if you happen to be one of her children, or their partners. Though financially well off, Diana refuses to loan her son and daughter-in-law money for a home deposit, pointing out, essentially, that theirs is a first world problem. And although she has her own reasons for refusing to give her daughter money for another round of IVF, her failure to explain those reasons to her daughter, who is desperate for a baby, leaves Diana looking harsh and unsympathetic.
When Diana is found dead it’s initially unclear whether it was murder or suicide. And when her family discover she lied to them about having breast cancer and has left all her money to charity, there’s a collective sense of WTF?!
It’s such a relief to read a gripping thriller with complex, intelligently drawn characters. I feel like ripping the vast majority of books off the crime fiction shelves in bookshops and replacing them with multiple copies of this one. This is how you do it.
Diana is a brilliant and quite brittle character. Her tough past as a single mother estranged from her Catholic family in 1970’s Australia means she feels most at ease with the pregnant refugees her charity supports. She respects the fact they have struggled and is more comfortable helping them than her own priviledged children.
Diana’s relationship with her daughter-in-law Lucy is characterised by a mutual sense of incomprehension. Lucy longs for a mother figure and can’t fathom Diana’s apparent indifference to her. Diana thinks Lucy is a good mother, though she’s never told her so, but she cannot understand Lucy’s choice to remain out of the workforce after the birth of her children, because what if something happens to her husband?
Why, Lucy wonders, are mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationships often so deeply fraught? Why don’t sons-in-law and fathers-in-law have the same issues? The book suggests it’s because mothers-in-laws and daughters-in-law care too much. And that sounds about right to me.
So many of the relationships in this novel ring true; the way the family cope with the lazy, abrasive son/brother-in-law, the massive role money plays in the childrens’ interactions with their parents, the misunderstandings that stem from acts intended to be kind, the perceived transgressions in the way grandparents take care of their grandkids and the way advice offered up by the older generation in an attempt to be helpful is so often perceived as criticism. As a portrait of a family, The Mother-In-Law is utterly believable. At the same time it’s a compelling mystery as information from the police investigation into Diana’s death is slowly drip-fed to the family and they become increasingly isolated from one another. Lucy’s husband is identified as being present at Diana’s house the afternoon Diana died. Does that mean…..? And what does Lucy know about Diana’s intention to commit suicide?
Buy this book. Read it. Choose it for your book club if you have one. And then get onto all the other Sally Hepworth novels, like I’m about to.
