Excerpt from The Family Tree by Carole Cadwalladr, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Open?"

"Elsa says Suzanne says she doesn't want to succumb to the constraints of petit-bourgeois morality."

"Oh." I looked at Lucy, impressed.

Naturally we studied our reference materials, poring over the pages of the dictionary together. We looked carefully at all the entries under "open" but it didn't make any sense.

"Open to suggestions?" said Lucy.

"Open all hours?"

"Open or shut?"

"Open sesame!"

In the end we gave up and played Connect 4 instead.





"Mum?"

It was a Saturday morning and we were sitting around the breakfast bar. My mother seemed to be trying to ignore me. She was reading Woman's Own and I jiggled up and down in my seat in front of her, but she turned her head the other way.

"Mum?"

"Mum?"

Finally, she turned a page in her book and said, "Hmm?"

"What's an open marriage?"

My father rustled the paper. My mother hesitated then lifted her head.

"I beg your pardon?"

"What's an open marriage? Is it different from a closed marriage?"

She was wearing her Reactolites, and as she turned her head, her face moved from shadow to sunlight. The glasses darkened. Her eyes vanished.

"Who on earth has been putting such ideas into your head?"

"Nobody. I was just wondering." I was beginning to suspect this wasn't such a good idea after all. In our house there was a general rule that questions weren't given a direct answer if an indirect one would suffice.

"Aunty Suzanne and Uncle Kenneth have an open marriage."

My father dropped the Daily Mail

"Well!" said my mother.

I hesitated.

"Aunty Suzanne doesn't want to succor petty morality."

Was that right? I was suddenly unsure.

"Doesn't she now? Well that wouldn't surprise me! A leopard doesn't change its spots!"

My mother liked her proverbs, trusty family heirlooms handed from one generation to the next, made shiny with use. She took off her Reactolites and started cleaning them with a piece of paper towel.

"She's got a nerve. I'll say that for her."

My father coughed, picked his newspaper back up, and from behind her copy of Woman's Own, I saw my mother raise her eyebrows at him. What neither of them realized was that this exchange of information cut both ways. Lucy, at that moment, was informing her own mother that Aunty Doreen wore a Playtex twenty-four-hour girdle in bed.




1.3 annotate vt : furnish with notes

I watched Love Story* again the other day. I wanted to remember how we thought falling in love was meant to be. The sex, I have to say, was disappointing: all soft lighting and cut-away camera work. I'm an academic now (of sorts), so footnoting is what I do. To understand my story, you need the cultural references—the historical circumstances—you need to remember what the late seventies were like.

It wasn't all wearing moon boots down to the disco and driving Ford Capris. But people tend to forget that. They forget the silent Sundays, the early closing hours, the fat unfunny comedians cracking racist jokes while your dad sharpened the knife to cut the Sunday roast.

Maybe that wasn't the seventies. Maybe that was childhood. Or the suburbs. I can't say. I've never been back. My seventies—The Long Seventies, I think I'll call them—ended on July 29, 1981. The day my mother died.



Do I need to annotate Alistair and me? Probably. We're one of those couples you meet and think, Well I'd never have put them together. I don't think there's much of a resemblance to Erich Segal's Love Story, all things told, but I'm going to borrow the structure anyway. Love stories, after all, follow certain conventions. Boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy and girl live happily ever after. You know the kind of thing.

From The Family Tree by Carole Cadwalladr, pages 1-17. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.