Susie Boyt and Gwendoline Riley

Novelists Susie Boyt and Gwendoline Riley talk about the depiction of mothers and daughters in their latest works, which explore many of the different ways family life can go wrong and what, if anything, can be done about it.

Boyt’s Loved and Missed deals with the limits, disappointments and excesses of love in all its forms. When your beloved daughter is lost in the fog of addiction and you make off with her baby in order to save the day, can will power and a daring creative zeal carry you through?

This story of family love wrings the heart: shows tenderness to each, makes you care for all… a gentle masterpiece.’ Joan Bakewell, The Observer, Books of the Year

Boyt is author of six other novels and a memoir, My Judy Garland Life, which was shortlisted for the Ackerley prize, serialised on Radio 4 and staged at the Nottingham playhouse. She is a contributor to FT Weekend and also works as a bereavement counsellor for the charity Cruse. Marie Marie Hold On Tight!, a show she has co-written about TS Eliot and Marie Lloyd, will be performed at Wilton’s Music Hall in April.

Riley’s My Phantoms is a painfully funny account of a family strained to breaking point and of a reckoning with the damage we do over the course of a life. Bridget’s mother Helen has always been a mystery to her. As she looks back over their fractious relationship, she is forced to confront the cruelties inflicted on both sides.

Riley is the author of First Love, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and of Cold Water, Sick Notes, Joshua Spassky and Opposed Positions. She has also been awarded a Betty Trask Award and a Somerset Maugham Award.

An FT Weekend at the Bodleian event.