Psyche: Dog Day Blues: We were a new stepfamily, and only the puppy was missing. With Elsa, we lobbed a grenade into the mix

Aeon: A Patchwork Family: After my marriage failed, I strove to create a new family – one made beautiful by the loving way it’s stitched together

Recently I watched again the classic film adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County and felt a bolt of recognition at what is known in film circles as the ‘Madison County Moment’. Francesca (played by Meryl Streep) is with her husband in their Chevy, and her lover is in the pick-up truck in front. She grips the door handle, her life on a pivot: should she stay or go? Caught between duty and freedom, she’s in no doubt of the love she feels for Robert (Clint Eastwood), but to pursue it would entail destroying her family and living with a haunting regret. However, if she stays, will this passion persist in her consciousness as an unrealised, unlived life? When young and childfree, it is much easier to break away from a partnership and start afresh, but those of us with family need to understand that damage is inevitable, that it’s simply not possible to shake off the past. ‘No matter how much distance we put between ourselves and this house, I bring it with me,’ Francesca had told Robert on the last evening they’d spent together, when he’d begged her to leave with him. ‘And I’ll feel it every minute we’re together.’ The life that was left behind.

Aeon: Idealising the Predator: How did certain French intellectuals get away with preying upon young girls, shamelessly, in public and over decades?:

In January 2020, Le consentement (Consent) by Vanessa Springora was published, a memoir exposé of Gabriel Matzneff, a well-known and much-respected French writer, but also a shameless predator of teen girls and preteen boys. Springora charts her two-year relationship with Matzneff, which began in 1986, when she was 14 and he 49, and critiques the cultural landscape that allowed it to happen, the complicity of her mother, and the intellectual and artistic circles that revolved around the Parisian neighbourhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés where they lived. A year later, there was another astonishing exposé, La familia grande (2021) by Camille Kouchner – the daughter of France’s former foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner – documenting the incestuous relationship between her stepfather, the academic and politician Olivier Duhamel, and Kouchner’s twin brother, then aged 14.

Aeon: My Sister, My Mirror: Vanessa and Virginia – Intimates in art, adversaries in love. Can we ever transcend the primary envy of the sisterly bond?

Before me are two portraits of famous sisters as children. They have that fixed quality of 19th-century photography. In one, a girl, sullen and serious, challenges the camera with passive resistance, hair as dark as her eyes; in the other, the girl glances upwards towards the light, her face set in a halo of ivy. The first girl clearly doesn’t want to be photographed; the second is serene, trusting, open. The portraits are of Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, and the photographs are in my mother Jane Dunn’s double biography, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy (1990). Earth and air; sensuality and intellect. Despite their dazzling differences, they appear like mirror images on opposite sides of facing pages. When I close the book, they fold together cheek to cheek.

Aeon: The Joy of Intimacy: A polyamorous friend challenges me: are you really happily monogamous or are you just hung up about your philandering dad?

Recently, a friend offered to put up some shelves for me. As we drove to the hardware shop, we got to talking about relationships and he mentioned that he was polyamorous: though he lives with his primary partner, he is free to be with other women too. He told me how once, by chance, he’d found himself dancing in a nightclub with all his lovers: tickled by the memory, he tapped a beat on the steering wheel.

‘That’s cool,’ I said, smiling.

Aeon: The Lost Children: The adults who joined Bhagwan’s ashram sought freedom, love and light. Many of their children found darkness instead.

We had no idea when our father was coming home, and so my brother and I told ourselves that Dad was dead. He hadn’t left kindly, with hushed words and reassurances, a slow progression from bedroom to spare room. He’d got up one morning, packed his bags and disappeared. Bought a single ticket to India with his new, Italian girlfriend.

My mother says that this is when I changed. Aged six. From bold, bright and confident, to mute and pale. I folded into a shell, forgot my smile. I have memories of school, on the scratchy library carpet behind my friends, and of losing my voice, a perpetual lump in my throat.

Granta: It’s Only Skin: ‘I knew what it was to be an object of desire, and to be submissive.’ Lily Dunn on being a painter’s model as a girl. 

As a teenager I painted portraits. I painted my friends and they painted me. We posed for each other in our various bedrooms, lying about in tracksuits and jerseys, among crumpled duvets, abandoned biscuits and fag packets.

I started with the eye and slowly moved outwards. With a fine brush or point of a pastel, I created shape and colour. Cautiously. I had to get the eye right in all its bruised splendour before committing to the cheek.

My friends sat for me with patience, trusting my gaze. I lost myself in the ease of these unified moments, their playfulness.

Granta: The Fog and the Sea: Lily Dunn on her father’s losing battle with alcoholism

On my dad’s bookshelf was a line of brown plastic bottles, and he knew exactly how many pills were in each: sleeping pills, antidepressants, something to numb the pain, something to dampen his urge for alcohol. This was America. A magic pill for everything. Every day he drew our attention to those pills: how few were left, and how anxious he was about running out. Endocet; Vicodin; diazepam.

‘Hey, you’ve come to visit your old dad!’ he’d said when I’d arrived at the gate. ‘You came all the way from England? For a holiday?’ He stood up with difficulty from a chair on the porch, colourless and tortured, washed out. I’d been told it was bad, but hadn’t expected this.

I had a wee piece published in Hinterland, a lovely quarterly magazine that published creative nonfiction. It’s called Waiting for God. You can read it only if you subscribe.

MIR Online: Walking Circles

He comes back and is put up in the Connaught for free, a suite, not just a room, with a bedroom and living room, a bathroom, finely upholstered sofas and antique tables, a walk-in wardrobe. A bar. A counter. A hand marked with age spots, fingers that twitch. That hand reaching for the thick crystal glass of brown liquid. He stands behind the bar, heavy but spinning. There are open cans of coke across the dark wood lacquer. Some half full, some empty. He paces the grand room, with drink in hand, distracted. London’s distant traffic hum is behind glass – floor to ceiling windows that don’t open – muted masses in Hyde Park, in and around the effervescent fountain. In here there are mouldings that crawl up the walls and along the ceiling like a vine. A lush carpet is spongy beneath bare feet that pad and pad. The curtains are sometimes closed. Light is mellow through a swash of white gauze, detail blurred. Guests prefer the air con, the constant isolated drone. A throat-tickling chill both cold and stuffy. His bed is made for a king. Its covers neatly tucked by a maid who visited that morning, and a small note on the pillow saying: Enjoy. A chocolate.

The Real Story: New Year’s Eve

You start early, dressing up in a downstairs bedroom, which is lamp lit with curtains drawn. A bed, a carpet and a bathroom, clothes all over the floor. Bubbles next, her parents’ tall glasses, drunk and then refilled, the hit at the back of the throat, the withdrawal of breath as it pops up the nose. Music on, a pirate radio station. Two girls on their feet and at the mirror, ‘Do I look alright? Should I wear this? That? You look better than me. So pretty. So slim. You do. You are!’

Litro Essay Saturday: The Good Mother: 

My daughter wants to play rough with me. We are in a friend’s garden, and she is slapping and hitting me until I have to defend myself by holding my arms in front of my face.

‘Why won’t you hit me back?’ she asks.
‘Because I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘But I want you to hurt me.’
‘Why?’ I laugh with unease.
‘I want to be treated roughly,’ she says.

Carolyn Jess Cooke asked me some years ago to be involved with her wonderful Arts Council-funded project, Writing Motherhood. I was invited to speak on panels at literary festivals about the effect motherhood has had on my writing, and I wrote a short piece called the Mutable Bed, which was then published in this anthology (Seren). You can buy it here.