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Jump to navigationJump to searchA Mother's Guide to Cheating by Kate Long (view source)
Revision as of 17:26, 1 March 2010
, 17:26, 1 March 2010no edit summary
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|name=Kate Long (the author)
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|comment= Dear Kerry
Thanks for your lovely and thorough review of AMTC. I admired the summary, especially of the climax of the novel here: ''The sight of a sleeping Matty is decision enough for Carol but when Jaz latterly discovers that her mother has joined forces with her father-in-law, David in a joint bid to reunite the warring pair, Jaz's abject fury bounces off the stratosphere and she disappears, taking Matty with her''. You have a neat way with words.
However, I did want to address this point: ''neither did I understand why Carol was insistent that Jaz take Ian back, in spite of how she personally suffered (and subsequently how her daughter suffered as a result of her parents' unhappy marriage) at the hands of someone who could not keep theirs to themselves. I did not get it and yet the entire tale seems to hinge around this precise point''.
There are three reasons Carol wants Jaz to stay with Ian. In the first stage she’s in simple denial: she just wants things back the way they were, when Jaz was “the happiest she’d ever been”. She can’t bear to see her daughter suffering so: “please, please think about a reconciliation with Ian. You’re so down, you’re going to make yourself ill.” Because of course she’s terrified Jaz is going to sink into clinical depression again.
The second reason you identify yourself in the first quotation: Carol can’t bear to imagine Matty’s life disrupted so brutally. She desperately wants him to grow up with his dad as part of the household (and Ian is a great dad). Her love for Matty is overwhelming, and she sees everything in relation to his well-being. “’The person who’s most important here,’ I said, ‘is Matty. He’s at the centre of all this, he’s the one caught up in the middle. Matty changes everything. If it weren’t for Matty—‘
But the third and most compelling reason is that she feels “shyly spoken, decent, awkward, straightforward” Ian is completely different from cocky Phil, and that therefore his motivation for infidelity wasn’t anything like the same – that the incident was truly a one-off. Her initial interview with Ian goes a long way to confirming what her instinct is telling her. Ian says: “I love Jaz, and Matty; they’re the only things I care about. Not that woman, she was nothing. What happened was a slip. It absolutely didn’t mean anything. It’ll never happen again.”
Then she hears the same again from his father, David:
“You do believe it was a one-off?”
“God, yes. My son’s not capable of any kind of sustained duplicity...[The girl’s] not important. Honestly. This slip was about a moment rather than an individual. We won’t hear from her again.”
Carol tests them both but they stick to the same earnest line. So essentially Ian is redeemable, and Carol understand this: “I let myself imagine, for a moment, what might have happened if someone had taken Phil aside all those years ago and told him. Whether Phil could have been straightened out...I had a chance to make things good.”
Yes, Jaz is vile, isn’t she? But she’s meant to be. She’ll get her come-uppance when Matty’s older, rest assured!
Best wishes
Kate Long
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