Why we need feuding families in our lives

The writer is an author of fiction, cookery books and poetry anthologies. Her latest book is ‘The Dinner Table’, a collection of food writing

I’ve always liked the kind of novel where all the fortune in the world can’t stop a big messy family from falling apart. It’s even better if the big messy family are genuinely decaying in some way, ideally with a rambling house that’s seen better days, ideally ideally with some deep-seated psychological eccentricities that surface generation after generation. Brideshead Revisited. The Corrections. Anna Karenina. The entire fictional and autobiographical output of the Mitford sisters. 

What joy, then, to live in a country with the Windsors as heads of state. 

The King, it is reported this week, has once again snubbed his younger son. What a magnificent sentence in this year of 2024. The King has snubbed his younger son by making his older son the chief of his — the younger son’s — former regiment in a row about the younger son’s inability to hold his tongue about the skeletons in the family cupboard. 

It’s like gossip from a thousand years ago, isn’t it? Pick any point in the last 10 centuries and you’ll find the younger sons of kings scheming against their fathers, and the fathers scheming right back at them. It is a timeless, eternal gossip factory — which explains, perhaps, why we keep them around. Say what you want about “national pride”; say what you want about “stability” and “continuity” and “soft power”: we all know that the real key function of the royals, ever as it has been, is as international soap opera. He did what? She said that? To whom? Then what? What did everyone say about it? 

It isn’t unique to the royals, of course: many famous families provide this service. Once more than one clan member has any kind of notoriety — in any industry — it’s all up for the whole lot of them. It only takes two to make a feud, after all. Consider the compelling cataclysm of the Le Pens, the Gallagher brothers, the Hitchens brothers, following in the footsteps of the Mitford sisters in being politically as well as personally divided.

The reason the British aristocracy is so rich in family feuds is because they are, in many ways, one very large family. If you take only those six Mitford sisters as a starting point, for example, it’s one quick hop in either direction to get stuck into the rich seams of the feuding Churchills or Kennedys, and then you’re really off to the races. 

It doesn’t matter that we have no inside information: how often, really, are you given inside information on someone else’s family? You’re always biased — even, especially, if you yourself are in the middle of it. It’s all spin, even on the most domestic front. 

It doesn’t matter how true it all is, either. That’s why shows such as Keeping Up with the Kardashians are no more or less true than The Crown, and why Succession might as well be a documentary. It all scratches the same itch, and asks the same questions.

More to the point, it lets us play out our own feelings on a safe stage: it lets us wonder how strong our own family bonds are and what might break them. It lets us contemplate sickness and health, or death and desire.

It’s like a playground, or a science lab, for our own families. Would you do that to me? What would you think if I did that? Would you let me write a tell-all memoir about our darkest secrets? If racially insensitive comments were made, would you speak up? If you made my child cry, would you brush it off as nothing or would you start a world war over it? What would happen if — when — someone dies?

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy families is unhappy in its own way.” Sure. 

But maybe it’s also true to say that all unhappinesses are alike: that what we’re really seeing, when we look at famous families falling apart, is a sense of common humanity, somewhere on the line between “there but for the grace of God” and “stars: they’re just like us”.