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Who's your favourite stepmother?
Posted on 06 Feb 2010
That's the question Guardian books asked me when they suggested I wrote a Top Ten for them on stepmothers in literature. How hard could that be? A lot harder than I expected. The thing is,...
The paperback of The Stepmothers' Support...
Posted on 04 Feb 2010
I know you can hardly have missed it, I've been banging on about it so much on twitter but, just in case you did, The Stepmothers' Support Group came out in paperback in the UK today! As you...
Posted on 01 Feb 2010
Just a quickie for everyone who's been asking: the US pub date has been announced and it's 22 June. As you can see, the cover treatment is quite different to the UK. It also has some extra...
Posted on 02 Oct 2009
One of the reasons I love Twitter - and there are many - is because if you miss something, you can be sure someone else on Twitter will spot it and let you know. Like a few weeks ago when a Red...
Who's your favourite stepmother?
Posted on 06 Feb 2010
That's the question Guardian books asked me when they suggested I wrote a Top Ten for them on stepmothers in literature. How hard could that be? A lot harder than I expected.
The thing is, there <are> lots of stepmums in literature, but not many of them are very nice, or normal, or anyone you might identify with. Because stepmums - who, let's face it, are just people who fall in love with someone who already has kids, which could happen to any one of us - get the short end of an already pretty short stick.
A few characters sprang instantly to mind, the stepmothers in Dombey & Son and Bonjour Tristesse, for instance, but I decided to ask my followers on twitter for their suggestions. They came thick and fast, but, broadly, they were more of the same. I wasn't hard up for wicked stepmothers, that was for sure.
Whilst some of the greatest stepmother characters are, of course, evil - stand up The Wicked Queen in Snow White who meets her most gruesome end in the Brothers Grimm's version - I wanted to look a little deeper than that. That's one of the reasons I wrote The Stepmothers' Support Group, after all.
The trick, I discovered, was to look for characters whose reason for existing in the first place isn't their stepmother-ness. Then, slowly but surely, I discovered a lot more women who just happened to be stepmothers but were lots of other things, too.
Take perhaps the most unlikely stepmother of all, Holly Golightly in Breakfast At Tiffany's.
But she's not a stepmother, I hear you cry.
Think about it for a minute: who is Holly before she becomes Holly? She's the teen bride Lula Mae who runs away from her husband Doc Golightly and, wait for it, his kids (her stepchildren) to recreate herself as the New York society girl we all know and love.
There are lots more surprising stepmothers in literature, in movies and on TV. Juno's stepmother - played by the brilliant Alison Janney - is one of my favourites, but I couldn't include her in my list because she's not technically a literary stepmum. Total respect though to Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody who wrote such a likeable but flawed character because she's a stepmother herself and thought they should be given a break. Don't we all.
Read my top ten stepmothers in literature here and let me know what you think. There's room to leave your comments at the bottom of the article.