Books explores children's reaction to widowed father's wish to remarry

Cathy Kelly’s new novel focuses on the negative reaction of children when their widowed father finds a new love Áilín Quinlan

You’re grown-up with your own family, but how would you feel if, following the death of your beloved mum, Dad suddenly indicated a desire to remarry?

Quite possibly very unhappy, according to best-selling author Cathy Kelly, who’s made this thorny topic a focal point of her latest book.

On the surface it’s about parents having the right to live their own lives — but it seems, their kids don’t always feel that way.

However, it’s not just hostile teenage children who resent the arrival of a new step-parent.

Many apparently mature, grown-up, sensible and generous-spirited children have serious issues with the mere thought of a bereaved parent going down the aisle with somebody new:

“There is resentment at a father or mother remarrying again. It’s not gender-specific,” says Kelly, whose books are number one best-sellers in Ireland, the UK, and Australia.

The prospect of a bereaved parent re-marrying, she adds, is often perceived as deeply disloyal to the dead parent.

“It’s very common and it’s probably because in Ireland we’re a bit behind other nations when it comes to the concept of new partners coming into a relationship.”

In fact, she believes, for adult offspring, re-marriage following bereavement may be even harder to swallow than re-marriage following divorce:

“This not about getting divorced and remarried, this is about a beloved parent dying and, in the eyes of the adult child, being replaced. People find it very hard to cope with. It throws up difficult questions.”

Like, for example, the fact that an adult child would secretly prefer to see a lonely widowed parent being on their own forever, grieving forever?

That’s neither realistic nor fair, Kelly protests:

“It’s refusing the parent the opportunity of having a new life which would allow them companionship,” says the Wicklow-based mother-of-two whose just-published her 18th novel.

Secrets of a Happy Marriage deals with the deep hostility encountered by Bess, a divorced woman in her 60s, when she marries the love of her life, Edward, a widowed father of two whose grown-up daughter objects in no uncertain terms to the union.

Kelly’s own father passed away many years ago, but she says she wouldn’t have been upset if her mother had ever taken the decision to try to find the happiness she had enjoyed during a long marriage.

“My father and my mother were devoted to one another. I’d actually love my mum to be able to have that happiness again, if the possibility ever entered her life, but she wouldn’t do so.

“However, I believe everyone is entitled to happiness,” she says, adding that she became interested in the topic after reading a fascinating article in Time magazine.

“As a writer I imagine scenarios and use my awareness of human nature to figure it out, and then I back it up with research. Bereaved people often re-marry because they are looking to recreate what they have lost.

“Men are are more likely to do this than women, and when this happens, the child resents the new partner because they believe their dead parent is being replaced.

“Of course, this is not what is happening — the widower or the widow is actually seeking the happiness they’ve lost, but for the novelist, the big question is ‘What If?’

“I thought ‘What If?’ And that’s where the story came from!”

The book is not just about the fall-out when a bereaved spouse re-marries, however — it takes a much wider look at marriages and at the different things that life can throw at marriage.

“Life can get in the way of marriage,” says Kelly, who points out that marriages go through tough times — sometimes partners are helpful, sometimes not, and it all has to be negotiated.

Kelly says he’s realistic about the pitfalls. “People often ring me to ask me to write pieces for St Valentine’s Day.

“They say I am the queen of romance and I feel like saying ‘Don’t you read my books?!’ That’s because I am a realist and I don’t think romance is always the answer.

“You might be married to a man who doesn’t buy cards but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you — there’s a lot more to marriage than that!”

She hopes, she says, that when people come to the end of her latest book, “they will be feeling a bit happier about their own marriages because they haven’t had some sort of perfect specimen of marriage held up before them all the way through.”

Secrets of a Happy Marriage by Cathy Kelly, published by Orion Fiction, is out now, €14.99