Edward St Aubyn told the book club audience that his Booker-nominated novel Mother's Milk was not originally intended to feature Patrick Melrose. But after 60 pages, he realised he was writing again about the fictional alter ego with which he made his name in the Some Hope trilogy.
He talked about how freedom was an insistent question throughout the book – how Patrick could or could not free himself from his past, how his wife Mary was caught in compulsive self-sacrifice and his mother Eleanor was similarly compelled to ill-judged philanthropy. All of the characters were trapped in their own personalities.
St Aubyn also discussed how – paradoxically for a novel with so many unusually articulate characters - wordlessness is one of the novel's key preoccupations, both for the newborn child Patrick's son imagines at the novel's beginning, and for the aphasic condition Eleanor finds herself in after her stroke.
