Family Album
Penelope Lively
Book notes
Only the very wealthy or the very poor can afford families of six children, which makes Alison and Charles Harper a bit of a curiosity. Although comfortably off, they are scarcely rich when they begin assembling their brood of four daughters and two sons in the late 1960s. Alison is determined to turn their seven-bedroomed Edwardian house into a shrine to ‘real old-fashioned family life’, a rather outdated notion even then, when women were trying to escape the bonds of domesticity. While Alison does what she does best - getting pregnant and playing earth mother, helped by a Scandinavian au pair - Charles remains largely detached from things, tucked away in his study writing scholarly books. Forty years on, the house is rundown and the children are grown-up, so it is a good time to reflect on how all concerned have turned out. Through a series of verbal snapshots from the family’s crowded biography, we gradually discover its secrets, large and small. Why did the eldest child, Paul, go off the rails? Why are there no grandchildren? Why is the au pair still there? And what is the biggest secret of all, which nobody dares to acknowledge? This brilliantly orchestrated story is as irresistible as family gossip.
About the author
Penelope Lively was born in Cairo in 1933 and spent her early childhood there before being sent to boarding school in England at the age of 12. She went on to read modern history at St. Anne's College, Oxford. In her prolific career, she has written numerous award-winning children’s books as well as short stories and novels for adults, three of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Moon Tiger, the story of a woman journalist's reflections on a troubled life as she lies dying in a hospital bed, won the prize in 1987. In 1957 she married Jack Lively and they had two children, Josephine and Adam. Jack Lively's academic career took the family from Swansea to Sussex and Oxford, and eventually to Warwick University, where he was Professor of Politics. He died in 1998. Penelope Lively now lives in London and has six grandchildren. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors, of which she is a former chairman. She is a former member of the Arts Council Literature Panel and of the Board of the British Library. She has been a member of the Board of the British Council and of the Council of Goldsmiths College. She was awarded the OBE in 1989 and a CBE in 2002.
Discussion points
1. How successful is Alison in creating her ideal of an ‘old-fashioned family life’?
2. How would you describe Charles and Alison’s marriage? Why do they stay together?
3. Do you think their children turned out successfully?
4. At one point, Gina says families are ‘at once utterly familiar and entirely unknown’. Do you agree?
5. Do you recognise anything from the Harpers life in your own family?
6. What role does the house, Allersmead, play in the family’s story?
7. Is Aunt Corinna, childless but with a prestigious career, more fulfilled than Alison?
8. What is the book saying about the role of the full-time housewife and mother?
9. What do you think of the way Alison’s reacts to the events which lead to the family’s big secret?
10. What does the future hold for Alison and Ingrid?
Author's view
Family life is eternally interesting - the dynamics of family life. It is an abiding subject in fiction, for good reason. I had been intending to write a family novel for some time, and when the ideas for Family Album began to take root, I determined to go for broke and write about a large family. Six children, there would be. I have no experience of large families; I was an only child, and had just two myself. But you stick your neck out as a novelist, or at least you should; far more intriguing to write of what you don’t know than to stay with a familiar landscape. And we do it all the time - women write of men, men write of women. Young writers try to imagine themselves into an older mind-set. I can do this family, I thought cheerfully. In fact, it was a challenge. Some of the siblings took a while to come out of the shadows, to establish themselves as characters. Gina and Paul, the two eldest, sprang to life at once; Katie and Clare lurked, for a time - I couldn’t get hold of them, place them within the group. Because, of course, the crucial dynamic of a family is how people relate to one another. I knew from the start that this family had a problem - a secret, if you like - something that was always there but of which no-one ever spoke. I knew, too, that there would be no dramatic denouement at the end, but that the hidden element would become gradually more and more evident; most readers would guess what had happened as the story - the stories - unfolded. Stories, not story, because I wanted each person to have a voice, a point of view. The vision of the family had to be multi-faceted, because that is how a family works - there are as many accounts of what it is and how it is as there are members. In the novel, the children view their parents, they tell it how it was - how each thought that it was. Alison, the mother, gives her own determinedly cheery, carefully deceptive version. We see Charles, the father, from several angles, and we get a shrewd idea of how he feels about his own position. And then there is Ingrid, the au pair girl who is no longer a girl and who has stayed for so many years. Ah, Ingrid. And there is a final character, an inanimate one - Allersmead, the house. I wanted to call the novel Allersmead, as a reflection of how central a feature it is, but my publishers weren’t keen; there is often much discussion about titles. Allersmead is a rambling house in a leafy suburb; it has seen out many families since it rose from a late Victorian building site. I wanted it to be the essential backdrop, lodged in everyone’s head - the place they all remember, that they still know. And as the novel dips backwards and forwards in time, the house remains constant; it is in a time-warp, but it is also declining, its roof needs repairs, it does not meet the requirements of the 21st century. The house, too, tells a story.