Trouble is brewing in Family Friends: the propulsive new novel by art critic and author Chloë Ashby. Since meeting 20 years ago, four friends and their families have spent the end of every summer together in France. Between marriages, funeral arrangements and new teenage relationships, old attachments resurface and a secret threatens to tear both families apart.
This latest novel is a noticeable departure from the close first-person perspectives of Ashby’s first two: Wet Paint, the story of a grieving young woman navigating misogyny and precarity in London’s art world, and Second Self, which follows an art conservator who begins to doubt her decision not to have children. The result is the author’s most mature and expansive novel yet: a shrewd portrait of marriage which asks how well we can ever know the people with whom we choose to spend our lives alongside.
Here, Chloë Ashby discusses parenthood, “difficult” characters and writing an ensemble novel.
Katie Tobin: In your first two novels, there’s a heavy focus on your main characters’ jobs. What function does work serve in your fiction? Do you see those professional identities as enabling or limiting the lives your characters can imagine for themselves?
Chloë Ashby: In Wet Paint and Second Self, the protagonists’ jobs are entwined with ideas I wanted to explore on the page and, on the whole, their professional identities help them find a way forward: through her work as a life model, Eve in Wet Paint manages to solidify her slippery sense of self; and for Cathy in Second Self, her work as a conservator shows her that there are other forms of nurture and care beyond motherhood.
Work is a funny one in Family Friends: it’s physically absent but psychologically very present. Despite being on holiday, all the adults bring their work problems with them. There’s Will, who lost his job months ago and hasn’t told his wife, Maggie. Then there’s Lydia, who’s given him a loan even though, for the first time, she’s in a financially precarious situation herself. Roland spends most of the trip writing in a garret-like tower, which he feels able to do thanks to romantic ideas about what it’s like to be a writer or an artist.
KT: How did writing an ensemble cast present new challenges for you?
CA: It was something I was really keen to do with this book, because I’d written two novels from the perspective of young women – one 26 years old, the other 35. I wanted a challenge and that involved a bigger cast of characters.
I really love the intensity and claustrophobia you get with a single, first-person narrator, but this book is all about the intricacies and entanglements of a group of friends, so it benefits from multiple points of view. I probably had the most fun with Issy, a beautiful, intelligent, rebellious not-quite-adult. She’s a stranger figure in the novel, who’s there for the first time and gets to see things with fresh eyes, disrupting the group’s habits.
KT: Were there moments where your sympathies shifted between characters as you were writing?
CA: Yes, and it made me feel quite fickle because I’d spend days, weeks with one person, and then, by the end of the chapter, I’d find my loyalty shifting. But that was quite intentional. I was thinking a lot about people making mistakes – we all do – and at what point does doing a bad thing make you a bad person. Will is probably the character who’s the hardest to forgive or sympathise with, but I hope I’ve shown different sides to him – that he’s a good father, for example. Ultimately, as a reader, I’m drawn to books with characters who are morally grey, as we often are.
“I’m drawn to books with characters who are morally grey, as we often are” – Chloë Ashby
KT: Lydia was the character I found myself drawn to in that sense.
CA: Lydia surprised me during the writing process, and I hope she surprises readers too. She comes from a privileged background – you could call her a nepo baby – but she’s incredibly hard-working. She’s at once impulsive and thoughtful. She has this silvery sort of confidence about her, which is tied up with class; she’s always had financial security, which has given her freedoms the others lack. When they were all studying together, those material differences between them were largely hidden from view, but as they’ve grown up and settled into their lives, the gaps have become more visible. In part, the novel is about how we handle those differences, and whether it’s possible as friends to look beyond them.
KT: Family Friends is the first book you’ve written since becoming a parent. Has that changed how you approach the writing process at all?
CA: I really enjoyed writing the children in this novel. I’ve always been drawn to child disrupters in fiction – characters like Briony Tallis in Atonement or Astrid in The Accidental. There’s something exciting about giving children agency. With this book, the holiday setting worked so well because children are often left to their own devices on holiday in ways they aren’t at home. I wrote the book while trying to have a baby and then while pregnant, so I was thinking a lot about what family life can look like. I kept thinking back to my childhood memories of chaotic group holidays with my parents and their friends and families – the strange dynamics and hushed conversations and the way children quietly notice things.
KT: The novel’s sexual politics are really interesting. There’s Lydia and Roland, who began their relationship when she was a student and he was married. But there are a few other relationships that feel tricky to ethically reckon with. Was it hard to resist prescribing a clear moral position on some subjects, as tempting as it might have been?
CA: There are two particularly thorny relationships in this book, and the one between Sammy and Issy – and the subsequent fallout – was there from the start. Roland’s history with students came out more organically during the writing, and it ended up creating an interesting mirroring effect when it comes to issues of age and consent. I didn’t want to tell the reader what to think because these situations are always so complicated in real life, and a neat moral position wouldn’t have felt convincing to me. But one benefit of having such a large cast is that different characters can voice different perspectives. As a teacher involved in safeguarding, Maggie thinks in terms of rules and boundaries, for example, whereas Lydia places love and desire above everything else. One of the biggest questions I wanted to leave readers thinking about was how much these characters should, or could, forgive and overcome – as families, as friends.
Family Friends by Chloë Ashby is published by Fig Tree and is out now.
