Like Mother, Like Daughter: Fran Fabriczki & Charlotte Mendelson
Multi award-winning writer and editor Charlotte Mendelson and vibrant literary newcomer Fran Fabriczki discuss the joys and challenges of depicting messy mother-daughter dynamics in their fiction.
As part of our ongoing series spotlighting debut authors alongside established novelists, we’re delighted to welcome multi award-winning writer and editor Charlotte Mendelson and vibrant literary newcomer Fran Fabriczki for an open and honest discussion about the joys and challenges of depicting messy mother-daughter dynamics in their fiction.
Like her Booker and Women’s Prize-longlisted novel Almost English, Charlotte Mendelson’s new novel Wife she turns a wry and unflinching eye on the domestic sphere and the complexities of motherhood and female identity. Fran’s debut, Porcupines, is a poignant and witty depiction of a daughter trying to understand where she comes from.
Together they will discuss how they interweave their Hungarian heritage into their fiction and use this as a lens through which to explore cultural difference and belonging, inside and outside the family.
Wife by Charlotte Mendelson
Dr Penny Cartwright is everything that Zoe Stamper is not: glamorous, sophisticated and openly gay. When they begin a passionate affair, a lifetime of wedded bliss seems within Zoe’s grasp. But this is not a love story. It’s the story of how love can bring about disaster . . .
When Zoe Stamper meets fellow academic Dr Penny Cartwright at a party, she seems impossibly glamorous to Zoe, who is, after all, several rungs down the academic pecking order – and a nervous ingénue as far as Penny’s sophisticated circle is concerned. But Penny leaves Zoe a cryptic note, and a passionate affair ensues . . .
Once Penny confesses all to her live-in lover, Justine, their path is cleared to a life of mutual contentment and marital bliss. But there is something else Penny needs as badly in her life as Zoe’s adoration, and thus the beginning of their affair might also have signalled its end.
Wife is an acutely observed and coruscating novel about the joys of passionate love and motherhood, and those left behind in its wake when passion curdles. It is heartbreaking and funny, profound and gripping, as it takes the reader from the end of a relationship to its beginning, and back again.
Charlotte Mendelson at her soul-searing best. Wife is just unbearably brilliant.
Porcupines by Fran Fabriczki
Los Angeles, 2001. Sonia is raising her daughter, Mila, alone in the sunny but somnolent suburbs of LA. Her days are a blur of not-quite-illegal business activities, avoiding other moms, and baking birthday cakes laced with rum: minor mistakes that nevertheless remind her she doesn’t belong.
Mila, meanwhile, is juggling violin and swimming lessons and navigating the treacherous social politics of school – all the while trying to get her mother to share something, anything, about her past.
But there are just too many things that Mila doesn’t know:
- She doesn’t know that her mother grew up in Soviet Hungary (where getting your hands on a banana was one of the greatest thrills in life)
- She doesn’t know that her mother has a sister called Rina (whom she hasn’t spoken to in 10 years)
- The only thing she does know about her father is that he was a ‘good time’ (according to her mother)
- Crucially, she doesn’t know that there is a very good reason why her mother dodges everyone, from traffic cops to vice principals.
So, Mila concocts a scheme to get her mother, and the man Mila is kind of sure must be her father to reconnect. It involves corralling Sonia into chaperoning an orchestra of ten-year-olds (most of whom seem to be called Megan) on a road trip from LA to San Francisco, and it may just cause their carefully constructed lives to implode.
Moving between Budapest before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Washington, DC in the tense years of the Cold War and the bright sunshine of early 2000s Los Angeles, Porcupines is an irresistible novel about mothers and daughters, belonging and reinvention, the things we carry with us, and those we tell ourselves we’ve left behind.
Image: Fran Fabriczki © Zsófia Bodnár
A haunting, funny and compulsively readable novel about the intricacies of family, loss and trust.
Fran Fabriczki was born in Budapest. She has lived in Los Angeles and currently lives in London. She read English at the University of Cambridge and worked in publishing for several years before going freelance to focus on her own writing. She graduated from the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing MA in 2022 and received the Curtis Brown Award for her dissertation. Porcupines is her debut novel.
Charlotte Mendelson’s previous novel, The Exhibitionist, was long listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was The Times Novel of the Year 2022, as well as a book of the year in The Telegraph and The Guardian.
Her other novels include Almost English, which was long listed for both the Man Booker and the Women’s Prize for Fiction; When We Were Bad, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and was a book of the year in The Observer, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The New Statesman and The Spectator; and Daughters of Jerusalem, which won both the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
Wife, her sixth novel, will be published in August 2024.
She was a publisher for twenty years, reviews and broadcasts and has been the Gardening Correspondent forThe New Yorker.
She lives in London.
Image: Charlotte Mendelson
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