This book about child custody is, unsurprisingly, full of pain. The pain of mothers separated from their children, of children sobbing for their mothers, of adults who have never moved on from the trauma of their youth, and of young people who are forced to live out the conflicts of their elders. Lara Feigel casts her net across history and fiction, reportage and memoir, and while her research is undeniably impressive and her candour moving, at times she struggles to create a narrative that can hold all these tales of anguish together.
The book begins with a woman flinging herself fully clothed into a river and then restlessly walking on, swimming again, walking again. This is French novelist George Sand, driven to desperate anxiety as she waits to go into court to fight for the right to custody of her children. But almost immediately the story flicks away to Feigel’s own custody battle, and then back into the early 19th century, with Caroline Norton’s sons being taken away in a carriage in the rain by their father.
Norton was the extraordinary woman who seemed to be able to transmute the pain of separation into progress. Because of her courageous campaigning, women won basic rights over their own property and children. Her tale can be read as a harbinger of hope, but it is also shot through with tragedy, including the death of one of her boys during their enforced estrangement.
And given the way Norton’s story is framed here, it becomes impossible to hold on to any sense of progress. We step quickly from 19th-century London back into the maelstrom of Sand’s domestic life, and see how prejudice towards independent women that worked against Norton in England were also present in France. From there we switch to the United States, where poor Elizabeth Packard, who disagreed with her husband’s religious views, was forced away from her children and into an insane asylum. And then a jump cut to 2008, watching Britney Spears being incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital without her beloved children.
Feigel meets Edna O’Brien for an interview and finds her “hollow-eyed with pain after a sleepless night”. O’Brien did eventually win custody of her sons, but during their conversation the two writer mothers acknowledge the pain of their struggles with such honesty that it overcomes them. “We cry, both of us, talking about the promises we made that we could not keep; promises extracted that we believed in just about enough to make … what to do when you have a little boy crying in bed unable to sleep?”
The book could have ended there, in a shared moment that seems to sum up what happens when the irresistible forces of women’s liberation come up against the immovable objects of children’s needs, patriarchal reflexes, lawyers’ arguments and ex-spouses’ anger. Instead, we flick away again to the US, and into Alice Walker’s experiences of trying to share the care of her daughter with her husband after their divorce. Their arrangement was deeply resented by the daughter, Rebecca Walker, and Feigel takes this as evidence of the “curdling of the dreams of 1960s liberal progress”.
By this point it has become horribly clear to the reader that there is little, if any, sense of forward movement to be found in these stories. In the epilogue, Feigel shows through contemporary courtrooms and documents how children are still being caused unnecessary pain by both parents and lawyers. Here, new voices and characters spring to life, each demanding empathy and outrage, but the presentation feels too rushed to do justice to their compelling tales.
Feigel tries to end the book on an upbeat note: “Perhaps,” she writes, “we can imagine a version of modernity that isn’t flummoxed by motherhood, where emancipation and care can coexist; perhaps we can imagine a version of the legal system that gives children genuine agency.” Given the stories she has told, such hope feels thin and fragile indeed.
• Custody: The Secret History of Mothers by Lara Feigel is published by William Collins (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
