Book Review: "The Mother-in-Law" by Sally Hepworth

Sally Hepworth is under-read and underrated. There, I said it. I have never seen her mentioned in your silly BookToks and I have never read about her being on anyone's top ten. But seriously though, she is massively under-appreciated because her books are pure drama. They are all drama. If you love your soap operas, if you love your TV shows and your Netflix binges of all things familial then you're going to adore this woman. I have previously reviewed "Darling Girls" and "The Things We Keep", both of which are linked below. But honestly, if you're not reading her then what are you doing?

Let us get into today's review...

When Diana dies in an apparent suicide, her daughter-in-law, Lucy and her son, Ollie are left with most of the collateral damage. Police officers are in and out of their house, a house which has three children in it already and atop of this they seem to have their suspicions on the fact that this suicide wasn't as straight forward as it sounds. Told in alternating past and present narratives which also switch between Diana and Lucy, we are taken through a family filled with horrifying secrets that they conceal from each other with their lives. If there is one thing that Sally Hepworth is good at it is familial dramas - she has constantly delivered hit after hit on this homefront and well, grab a bag of popcorn because this is about to get way deeper than whatever you're expecting.

Ollie is a bit of a useless idiot if I'm being honest - he is the trope of dumb millennial husband and has a sister who is much more useful named Nettie (Antoinette). Nettie has a problem: she can't get pregnant properly but wants a baby and when she does get pregnant properly she miscarries. She starts asking people for money to help with her possibility of getting pregnant and then makes a very strange move on Lucy to try to get her to help, but it's not all about money then. Nettie is married to Patrick, a man who is even less useful than Ollie and according to Diana, is cheating on Nettie with other women. Throughout this book, there is this undertone of men being not really fully in the picture and the entire show being run by the women. The deep inner lives of the female characters seem to be the show-front to this novel and of course, I am all here for it.

Between Diana, Lucy and Nettie, there is a strained relationship. Each is trying to keep the other people in their lives happy and yet each is failing in their own special way because of secrets they are holding on to. Lucy for instance, makes her husband Ollie promise to never ask his parents for money ever again - Ollie must keep that promise. The problem is, does he? Nettie has asked her mother for monetary help when it comes to getting pregnant and her mother blatantly said no - of course Nettie hates her but Nettie doesn't know what Diana knows about Patrick. Diana is also hiding her own secret from one fateful season in 1970 when she was sent off to live somewhere else for a while. Sally Hepworth weaves an intergenerational story which has money at its centre but for everyone involved, it is about so much more than that. It is about face, it is about reputation and it is about what it really means to live and suffer as a woman.

The writing is incredible. We have these few very distinct voices that don't even seem remotely the same, speaking from their pasts, their presents and their secrets. I love the way Sally Hepworth makes light work of not only who is speaking but what time in their past they are referring to. Each thing in the novel connects so that we can find out what really happened to Diana in the end. There's so many layers to be revealed and each one peeled back, leads us closer to the truth about this family, closer to what caused Diana's death. Oh, and if you're wondering: it wasn't really a suicide...or was it?