Considered the voice of British feminist conscience in the 1960s, the controversial Fay Weldon, in The Stepmother's Diary, turns her fictional machine gun on the nuances of domestic life. The plot revolves around Sappho. One day, she knocks on her visibly distraught mother's door to ask her to hide her diaries. They are several notebooks, hastily gathered in a supermarket bag, in which Sappho tells the story of her marriage to Gavin. Once the diaries are handed over, she disappears into the world, and her mother, Emily, a Freudian psychoanalyst, sees no choice but to delve deeper into her beloved daughter's story. However, curiosity gives way to profound anguish as the worried mother discovers the disturbing situations her daughter has been exposed to in recent years. A young playwright, Sappho spent years living closely with the Garner family: Gavin, her attractive and devoted husband; Isolde, a renowned playwright; and Arthur and Isobel, the couple's children, then just innocent children. Isolde died a painful death when the children were still young, and years later, when Sappho and Gavin reunite and become involved, his entire family history gradually reveals itself as a burden that requires much more than goodwill to bear. With pauses for Emily's psychoanalytic analyses and the dramas of the present, the past gradually reveals a world of tragedies and pitfalls of domestic life, frightening in its complexity. And the reader is invited to immerse themselves in this breathless, fluid, and elegant narrative, which unveils at a dizzying pace the moments in the life and family of Sappho, who is suddenly forced into the old role of the hated stepmother.
