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Spectator
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Adrift in the world: My Sister and Other Lovers, by Esther Freud, reviewed
Some people spend years squirming on a leather chaise longue before they come to understand, as Philip Larkin so pithily observed: 'They fuck you up, your mum and dad.' Few go on to make peace with the sagacity delivered in his next line: 'They may not mean to, but they do.' In My Sister and Other Lovers, Esther Freud's sequel to her autobiographical novel Hideous Kinky, sisters Lucy and Bea – who spent their early childhood trailing after their hippy mother through 1960s Morocco – slowly edge towards such catharsis. Before that, however, comes a lot more turbulence, and Freud – whose great-grandfather pioneered the couch method – is acutely attentive to its psychological effects. Back in the UK, but still bound to a mother who hitchhikes her way from one disastrous situation to the next, we see the now grown-up sisters attempt, and often fail, to negotiate life on their own terms. Lucy, the narrator, helplessly caught between her fiery older sister and her unreliable parent, chooses men 'in direct relation to how likely they are to leave'. Bea, who is traumatised by childhood abuse, finds escape in heroin. For much of the novel, then, Bea is lost to that darkness, but Freud makes her absence feel like a presence. Delivered in an episodic style reflective of fractured lives, the book skims across time like a stone. When it lands, we're in a new place, with new people and years may have elapsed. Freud writes for the hard-working reader. She refuses to hold our hand. But there's a difference between trusting our intelligence and outright neglect. Writers, as Martin Amis once said, 'must be a good host'. When characters walk on without introduction and past events are mentioned as if we were there (but we weren't), it starts to feel like we've been abandoned at a party in a room full of strangers. Freud's proclivity for experimentation also leads to problems at sentence level. Missing commas, presumably sacrificed in the name of style, abound ('Hearing her name Pearl threw herself between us'); shifting into 'writerly' mode leads to confusing descriptions ('I swallowed so loud the gulp jumped in the car'); and dodgy similes ('The future lifted like a barn') make us feel not, as they should, the joy of recognition, but bewilderment. When style compromises meaning, it ceases to be style; it's just bad writing.
The Guardian
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud review – Hideous Kinky, the teenage years
Esther Freud's childhood on the Moroccan hippy trail inspired her 1992 debut Hideous Kinky. That novel was told through a young child's limited perspective, so daily life was described vividly – almond trees and coloured kaftans – while bigger issues, such as why she didn't see her father, remained vague and mysterious. Some 30 years later, Freud has returned to the same narrator, Lucy. But in this accomplished new novel, she explores how Lucy grows up and starts to question the impact of her unconventional upbringing. My Sister and Other Lovers opens with teenage Lucy, her mother and sister once again on the move. It's the 1970s, her mother has a new son from another failed relationship, and they are on a ferry to Ireland, as they have no money and nowhere else to go. Bohemian rootlessness in Morocco at least meant sunshine, but this is an altogether murkier existence. The family wait for buses in the rain, hitch lifts, share rooms in communal houses. Walls are cracked, carpets moth-eaten. Even a stay in a Scottish manor seems feral and dangerous: the girls eat tinned ravioli off the floor, play lethal games on frozen lakes, and roam in packs with other unsupervised teens. Sensing opportunity, men sniff about the sisters: they are girls without boundaries, grateful for any attention. This is a pre-#MeToo, pre-internet, pre-smartphone world. Messages are left on answering machines. Letters are left with pub barmen. Children are left with strangers. 'I love your mother,' says one of Lucy's friends later. 'Remember how she never minded what we did?' Once, the family stay at a farm where they are woken by screaming because the farm dog has killed its own puppies. The mother briskly tells her daughters that the dog did it 'for their own good'. This is the book's main concern: the damage that can be done to children by their parents. Both Lucy and her author seek to understand rather than condemn. We learn that Lucy's mother had kept her daughters secret from her Irish parents, preferring the hardship of a rackety life to the risk of ending up in an institution for unmarried mothers. Her defiance is admirable, but her refusal to conform has consequences, especially for elder sister Bea, who is preyed upon by one of her mother's boyfriends. One of the darkest elements of the novel is the mother's refusal to believe Bea. 'How could she remember? She was only six years old!' In the absence of a stable family, the relationship between the sisters becomes vital – and is beautifully drawn. Furious Bea is determined to make her escape, while Lucy is desperate to keep them together. Lucy is an appealing narrator, both as a sensitive teenager and later as a young mother, aware of her own failings: 'I'd searched for a family with every job I'd done. How often I'd adopted one, only to find it more precarious than my own. I'd chosen men – I was starting to discover this – loved them in direct relation to how likely they were to leave.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion My Sister and Other Lovers is billed as a novel but arguably occupies an interesting grey area between novel and memoir, resisting the expectations of both and creating something all of its own. It has three parts, each showing Lucy and Bea at different points in their lives, but doesn't provide dates. Some characters appear in all three sections, but others simply vanish; unusual in a novel, yet close to the way life really is. Similarly, the decision not to name either parent in the book – they are always 'mother' or 'father' – seems both a refusal to identify them and a refusal to fictionalise. Intriguingly, Freud also explores the impact of sharing your family story. Bea ends up making a film about their childhood (as Hideous Kinky was made into a film starring Kate Winslet) and, in an interview, tells a journalist she 'never felt safe'. This public exposure infuriates their mother. 'Write and tell them it's not true,' she demands. It's especially interesting as Lucy, our narrator, who we may have assumed is a stand-in for Freud, is here left to wonder why Bea's version of events is the one accepted as truth, while her memories remain private. There are, the novel suggests, multiple versions of every family story – even the one we are reading. It's a fascinating tangle of fact and fiction that refuses easy answers, and a subtle, clever, evocative book. My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Irish Independent
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Esther Freud: ‘As a child, living in Morocco my mother read to us from Tintin. We had three battered books that travelled with us wherever we went'
British author Esther Freud trained as an actress before writing her first novel, Hideous Kinky, which was made into a film starring Kate Winslet. Her other novels include The Sea House, Love Falls and I Couldn't Love You More. Her latest book My Sister and Other Lovers – a sequel to her first – is published by Bloomsbury. She contributes regularly to newspapers and magazines, and teaches creative writing in her own local group.
The Age
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
The one piece of advice Kate Winslet gave her actor daughter
The first time it occurred to Mia Threapleton that acting was a job she might be able to do, she was seven years old. She was watching Bugsy Malone, a comic musical starring a 13-year-old Jodie Foster as a Chicago gangster. 'I remember thinking: 'That looks really fun and she's really good and seems really cool. Is that something people can do that maybe I can do? Can I do that?'' A few years later, once she had realised that her lack of aptitude for maths probably ruled out becoming a marine biologist, she had made her decision. She told her mother she was going to be an actor. 'She said: 'Oh really? Well, if that's what you want to do, darling, definitely do it. It's very hard work'.' Which stuck in her mind, she adds. 'Because that's the only advice she's ever really given me. 'Read the script as many times as you can.' And 'it's really hard work'. And yes, it is, but that's why I like it.' It was reliable advice, given that Threapleton's mother is Oscar-winning actor Kate Winslet. That was, however, as far as any stage mothering went. Her mother's career was not part of their family life; she had a home office, which was out of bounds, and a working life elsewhere. Threapleton, whose father met her mother when he was assistant director on her 1998 film Hideous Kinky, says she could count on her hands the number of times she visited a film set before she was employed on one. She was also in her teens before she realised her mum was properly famous. Even now, she hasn't seen many of Winslet's films. 'As I got older, kids sort of knew who my mum was,' she says. 'But no one ever commented. Sometimes they asked if I'd ever watched the car scene in Titanic and I'd say no.' When she was 12, she remembers, the film was playing on the family television. 'That was the only scene I ever remember her going 'Oh God!' and covering my eyes! And I remember turning round and saying, 'Mum, I can still hear it!'' Which was certainly a triumphant teenage riposte, but put an end to that family viewing. 'Till now, I've never seen that film all the way through,' she adds. 'It's a bit ewww, nah! But I honestly haven't watched very many things she's done.' She thinks about that, then name-checks Michel Gondry's 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. 'That one is really an amazing piece of artistry, on every level.' In 2022, the pair appeared together in an episode of Channel 4's I Am... series, as a mother and daughter navigating the perils of social media. When Winslet won the BAFTA for best actress, she paid tribute to Threapleton, saying 'there were days when it was agony for her to dig as deeply as she did into very frightening emotional territory sometimes, and it took my breath away'. Threapleton knew that her mother had achieved her career on her own; she didn't have any strings to pull. She wanted to do the same. Once she had made her decision, she found websites listing auditions under her own steam and started putting herself forward for open castings. Looking back at the first few audition tapes she made, she sees how much she learned from that process. Loading 'It's sad not to get the jobs you really want, but it's fun in the first place and a great learning opportunity, to try new things and throw things at the wall and see what sticks.' She looked for an agent only in her last year at school. 'I really wanted to finish school, because I was very aware that this might not work out and I might need a contingency plan,' she says. 'Also, I needed to do it for myself.' The week after she finished school, her new agent sent her a script. 'I read it and I was excited. I was quite exhausted as well, because the second year of A-levels was really difficult for me, but I'd made it. So I said then right, now's the time to commit or it's going to be shit. That's kind of my life motto now. Commit or it's shit. I think that's actually something my mum said to me.' A couple of weeks later, she was on the set of her first film, an Italian-Irish co-production called Shadows, which was a thrill; she was so green that she didn't even know what a camera angle was. 'How I came to be where I am now was entirely me-oriented. Nobody pushed me ... Nobody said 'oh, you'd be good, you should do that'.' Where she is now – exactly now – is the Cannes Film Festival, due to walk the red carpet with celebrated director Wes Anderson and a cohort of stars who feature regularly in his quirky, stylised comedies of very elaborate manners. Threapleton plays a leading role in his latest film, The Phoenician Scheme, as Liesl, the disaffected daughter of a ruthless business tycoon, Zsa-zsa Korda, played by Benicio del Toro. Threapleton is still touchingly breathless at having worked with the stars Anderson regularly summons for his film-making summer camps, where cast and crew live and eat together for the duration of the shoot and Anderson sets out a table of films and books for them to watch and read as inspiration. They filmed at Babelsberg Studios and stayed in a hotel by one of Berlin's pristine lakes, going swimming on days off. At the dinner table, she might find Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson and Benedict Cumberbatch, even Tom Hanks. She couldn't believe, she said later, that she was there with Woody from Toy Story. Like Anderson's earlier film The Royal Tenenbaums, this is a story of unhappy families. Korda has just survived a sixth assassination attempt and decided it is time to hand over his empire to his only daughter, passing over his brood of witless sons. She will secure their fortune's future by pushing through his pet project, a vast real-estate deal in a developing economy that is being passed off as economically benevolent and environmentally responsible. Liesl wants nothing to do with it. For one thing, she hasn't seen her father in six years. And another thing: she's now a nun. In line with the rest of her self-driven career, Threapleton was chosen for the role on the basis of an audition tape, one of hundreds sent in response to a casting call. In an interview in Vanity Fair, Anderson said her reading stood out from a very large pack. 'She was clearly really thinking about every moment. She just seemed completely authentic,' he said. 'When you see the same scene played again and again and again by people who maybe aren't right for the part anyway, to have somebody who seems like she's in a documentary and she's interesting – this stops everything.' It might surprise fans of Anderson's arch, meticulously constructed meta-worlds to read that he wanted someone who seemed real, especially after seeing Threapleton as Liesl. When she isn't speaking, her face is set in an expression of mute resistance; her movements are not so much robotic as geometric, so that she seems to click into position. Her voice, uncannily like her mother's, is clear and clipped. She is like the most Andersonian character ever to be in an Anderson film, to the manner born. What she says Anderson wanted from her, however, was a kind of naturalism. 'When I did my first audition tape, I had a feeling of how I wanted to do it: in the way that makes the most sense to me. And that, it turns out, was what Wes wanted when it came to filming.' He would regularly tell her to be simple, more natural; on one occasion, he spotted her between takes standing with her hands on her hips and jumped out to tell her to hold that stance. 'It was just very casual, very matter-of-fact,' she says. He does a huge number of takes, she discovered; on the first day, when they just shot little extra moments, they did 69. 'And that turned out to be a middle ground. Because he knows exactly what he wants – and he's questing to find that. And then he finds new things as we go, so they get added in. It's quite orchestral, in a way. A bit more of this, less of that, then all together.' Liesl's ramrod back was one aspect of the character that came naturally to her. 'I stand up quite straight anyway because I'm five foot three, so everyone's taller than me. Her physicality and body positioning isn't actually dissimilar from my own. Her stillness and steadiness and precision: that was something that ended up happening after I had the costume on. Partly because I refused to sit down in it when we weren't filming. The material, I could see, was going to crease instantly.' Funny, that's just the kind of thing you would expect from her down-to-earth mother, concerned not to create more unnecessary ironing. The two women have a similar sort of boisterous physicality, too. As a child, says Threapleton, she wanted to be George in The Famous Five. 'I was forever climbing trees; my knees were filthy as a kid. And I wanted to have Timmy the dog! I do now have a dog, so I do feel like George. It's a little dream that came true, I guess.' Her mother would lead the charge on weekend walks, setting a cracking marching pace, through local fields or on trips further to the countryside. 'I now do that myself on a much more extreme level,' she says. 'I love that. That's my little escape. Long distance, camping, taking the dog for a week and just walking around different places. Having little adventures, finding the places where nobody goes. I'm really happy with my own company.' That cheerful confidence doesn't quite extend, however, to the formidable rituals of the Cannes Film Festival. We spoke before The Phoenician Scheme 's premiere, accompanied by the pomp and ceremony that this festival, more than any other, has preserved from a previous era. At least she would be walking the red carpet with a crowd, given that Anderson's team would all be there. 'It's terrifying, absolutely terrifying,' she said. 'But I will be fine, doing a lot of deep breathing and concentrating on not falling over my own feet going up those stairs.' Loading The first time she saw The Phoenician Scheme, she told Vanity Fair, she was able to see it alone in a theatre: a special screening for the star. She admitted that she cried all the way through. After the Cannes screening, as the camera covering the now traditional standing ovation was focused on each of the film's team in turn, we saw that she once again had tears running down her face. People were applauding; people were applauding her. She tried to wipe the tears away, but her face kept crumpling. And it was an emotional moment. For Mia Threapleton, stardom had arrived.
Sydney Morning Herald
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
The one piece of advice Kate Winslet gave her actor daughter
The first time it occurred to Mia Threapleton that acting was a job she might be able to do, she was seven years old. She was watching Bugsy Malone, a comic musical starring a 13-year-old Jodie Foster as a Chicago gangster. 'I remember thinking: 'That looks really fun and she's really good and seems really cool. Is that something people can do that maybe I can do? Can I do that?'' A few years later, once she had realised that her lack of aptitude for maths probably ruled out becoming a marine biologist, she had made her decision. She told her mother she was going to be an actor. 'She said: 'Oh really? Well, if that's what you want to do, darling, definitely do it. It's very hard work'.' Which stuck in her mind, she adds. 'Because that's the only advice she's ever really given me. 'Read the script as many times as you can.' And 'it's really hard work'. And yes, it is, but that's why I like it.' It was reliable advice, given that Threapleton's mother is Oscar-winning actor Kate Winslet. That was, however, as far as any stage mothering went. Her mother's career was not part of their family life; she had a home office, which was out of bounds, and a working life elsewhere. Threapleton, whose father met her mother when he was assistant director on her 1998 film Hideous Kinky, says she could count on her hands the number of times she visited a film set before she was employed on one. She was also in her teens before she realised her mum was properly famous. Even now, she hasn't seen many of Winslet's films. 'As I got older, kids sort of knew who my mum was,' she says. 'But no one ever commented. Sometimes they asked if I'd ever watched the car scene in Titanic and I'd say no.' When she was 12, she remembers, the film was playing on the family television. 'That was the only scene I ever remember her going 'Oh God!' and covering my eyes! And I remember turning round and saying, 'Mum, I can still hear it!'' Which was certainly a triumphant teenage riposte, but put an end to that family viewing. 'Till now, I've never seen that film all the way through,' she adds. 'It's a bit ewww, nah! But I honestly haven't watched very many things she's done.' She thinks about that, then name-checks Michel Gondry's 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. 'That one is really an amazing piece of artistry, on every level.' In 2022, the pair appeared together in an episode of Channel 4's I Am... series, as a mother and daughter navigating the perils of social media. When Winslet won the BAFTA for best actress, she paid tribute to Threapleton, saying 'there were days when it was agony for her to dig as deeply as she did into very frightening emotional territory sometimes, and it took my breath away'. Threapleton knew that her mother had achieved her career on her own; she didn't have any strings to pull. She wanted to do the same. Once she had made her decision, she found websites listing auditions under her own steam and started putting herself forward for open castings. Looking back at the first few audition tapes she made, she sees how much she learned from that process. Loading 'It's sad not to get the jobs you really want, but it's fun in the first place and a great learning opportunity, to try new things and throw things at the wall and see what sticks.' She looked for an agent only in her last year at school. 'I really wanted to finish school, because I was very aware that this might not work out and I might need a contingency plan,' she says. 'Also, I needed to do it for myself.' The week after she finished school, her new agent sent her a script. 'I read it and I was excited. I was quite exhausted as well, because the second year of A-levels was really difficult for me, but I'd made it. So I said then right, now's the time to commit or it's going to be shit. That's kind of my life motto now. Commit or it's shit. I think that's actually something my mum said to me.' A couple of weeks later, she was on the set of her first film, an Italian-Irish co-production called Shadows, which was a thrill; she was so green that she didn't even know what a camera angle was. 'How I came to be where I am now was entirely me-oriented. Nobody pushed me ... Nobody said 'oh, you'd be good, you should do that'.' Where she is now – exactly now – is the Cannes Film Festival, due to walk the red carpet with celebrated director Wes Anderson and a cohort of stars who feature regularly in his quirky, stylised comedies of very elaborate manners. Threapleton plays a leading role in his latest film, The Phoenician Scheme, as Liesl, the disaffected daughter of a ruthless business tycoon, Zsa-zsa Korda, played by Benicio del Toro. Threapleton is still touchingly breathless at having worked with the stars Anderson regularly summons for his film-making summer camps, where cast and crew live and eat together for the duration of the shoot and Anderson sets out a table of films and books for them to watch and read as inspiration. They filmed at Babelsberg Studios and stayed in a hotel by one of Berlin's pristine lakes, going swimming on days off. At the dinner table, she might find Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson and Benedict Cumberbatch, even Tom Hanks. She couldn't believe, she said later, that she was there with Woody from Toy Story. Like Anderson's earlier film The Royal Tenenbaums, this is a story of unhappy families. Korda has just survived a sixth assassination attempt and decided it is time to hand over his empire to his only daughter, passing over his brood of witless sons. She will secure their fortune's future by pushing through his pet project, a vast real-estate deal in a developing economy that is being passed off as economically benevolent and environmentally responsible. Liesl wants nothing to do with it. For one thing, she hasn't seen her father in six years. And another thing: she's now a nun. In line with the rest of her self-driven career, Threapleton was chosen for the role on the basis of an audition tape, one of hundreds sent in response to a casting call. In an interview in Vanity Fair, Anderson said her reading stood out from a very large pack. 'She was clearly really thinking about every moment. She just seemed completely authentic,' he said. 'When you see the same scene played again and again and again by people who maybe aren't right for the part anyway, to have somebody who seems like she's in a documentary and she's interesting – this stops everything.' It might surprise fans of Anderson's arch, meticulously constructed meta-worlds to read that he wanted someone who seemed real, especially after seeing Threapleton as Liesl. When she isn't speaking, her face is set in an expression of mute resistance; her movements are not so much robotic as geometric, so that she seems to click into position. Her voice, uncannily like her mother's, is clear and clipped. She is like the most Andersonian character ever to be in an Anderson film, to the manner born. What she says Anderson wanted from her, however, was a kind of naturalism. 'When I did my first audition tape, I had a feeling of how I wanted to do it: in the way that makes the most sense to me. And that, it turns out, was what Wes wanted when it came to filming.' He would regularly tell her to be simple, more natural; on one occasion, he spotted her between takes standing with her hands on her hips and jumped out to tell her to hold that stance. 'It was just very casual, very matter-of-fact,' she says. He does a huge number of takes, she discovered; on the first day, when they just shot little extra moments, they did 69. 'And that turned out to be a middle ground. Because he knows exactly what he wants – and he's questing to find that. And then he finds new things as we go, so they get added in. It's quite orchestral, in a way. A bit more of this, less of that, then all together.' Liesl's ramrod back was one aspect of the character that came naturally to her. 'I stand up quite straight anyway because I'm five foot three, so everyone's taller than me. Her physicality and body positioning isn't actually dissimilar from my own. Her stillness and steadiness and precision: that was something that ended up happening after I had the costume on. Partly because I refused to sit down in it when we weren't filming. The material, I could see, was going to crease instantly.' Funny, that's just the kind of thing you would expect from her down-to-earth mother, concerned not to create more unnecessary ironing. The two women have a similar sort of boisterous physicality, too. As a child, says Threapleton, she wanted to be George in The Famous Five. 'I was forever climbing trees; my knees were filthy as a kid. And I wanted to have Timmy the dog! I do now have a dog, so I do feel like George. It's a little dream that came true, I guess.' Her mother would lead the charge on weekend walks, setting a cracking marching pace, through local fields or on trips further to the countryside. 'I now do that myself on a much more extreme level,' she says. 'I love that. That's my little escape. Long distance, camping, taking the dog for a week and just walking around different places. Having little adventures, finding the places where nobody goes. I'm really happy with my own company.' That cheerful confidence doesn't quite extend, however, to the formidable rituals of the Cannes Film Festival. We spoke before The Phoenician Scheme 's premiere, accompanied by the pomp and ceremony that this festival, more than any other, has preserved from a previous era. At least she would be walking the red carpet with a crowd, given that Anderson's team would all be there. 'It's terrifying, absolutely terrifying,' she said. 'But I will be fine, doing a lot of deep breathing and concentrating on not falling over my own feet going up those stairs.' Loading The first time she saw The Phoenician Scheme, she told Vanity Fair, she was able to see it alone in a theatre: a special screening for the star. She admitted that she cried all the way through. After the Cannes screening, as the camera covering the now traditional standing ovation was focused on each of the film's team in turn, we saw that she once again had tears running down her face. People were applauding; people were applauding her. She tried to wipe the tears away, but her face kept crumpling. And it was an emotional moment. For Mia Threapleton, stardom had arrived.
