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Need some holiday reading ideas...?
Posted on 08 Jul 2011
...then look no further than Red's Top Ten Beach Reads . Pick your favourites from a stellar list including Siri Hustvedt's deceptively slim The Summer Without Men and Anne Patchett's latest,...
Posted on 25 Jun 2011
Last week I was on the Vanessa Show on Channel 5 with the lovely Adele Parks . We were meant to be debating the concept of Fr-amily ie whether friends are the new family. I was saying we create...
Posted on 22 Jun 2011
That was the question we set out to answer last night at the Red Network event on Finding Your Passion (and making it pay) at London's Hospital Club. For the first time, instead of asking the...
Fancy a snoop around my house? PLUS Event...
Posted on 07 Jun 2011
Well, here's your chance - in the new issue of Red (july), on sale now, I subject myself to the This Life slot. And, honestly, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. I am full of...
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.