Fostering, Mary Loudon, Infidelity

Woman's Hour

BBC

Society & Culture

4.1 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 24 May 2019

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's Foster Care Fortnight. It's a yearly campaign designed to raise the profile of fostering and show how it can transform lives. It's also the time when there's a big push for new foster carers. According to the Fostering Network, over 8,000 new foster families are needed to meet demand. Mary Loudon, known for her non-fiction books, has written a first novel called My House is Falling Down. The story centres on a love triangle. Lucy, in her forties, married to Mark with two children falls passionately in love with a man in his sixties. Adamant that she will not deceive her husband, Lucy instead asks his advice. Mark’s reaction is startlingly unorthodox, leaving Lucy to steer an impossible course between duty and desire, adventure and security. The novel explores what infidelity means when no one lies about it. We explore the subject of infidelity from a historical, cultural and psychological perspective. How have our views changed over the centuries? Are women still judged more harshly than men when they have an affair? How to negotiate this tricky terrain?

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts
0:06.0	Hello, Jenny Marie, welcoming you to the Woman's Hour podcast for Friday, the 24th of May.
0:12.0	Now it was a rather busy morning to read the May resigned as Conservative Party leader
0:17.0	and of course we interrupted the programme.
0:19.0	To hear her statement outside Downing Street during our first discussion, which was about fostering.
0:25.0	After we'd heard that the Prime Minister will step down on the 7th of June,
0:29.0	we carried on with the programme as normal.
0:32.0	And we talked about infidelity, Mary Loudon joined us to discuss her first novel.
0:37.0	My house is falling down, which charts the progress of a wife and mother as she falls in love with another man.
0:43.0	We were then joined by an historian and a sex therapist.
0:47.0	What does infidelity mean in the 21st century?
0:51.0	How has it seen in the past?
0:53.0	And can a family survive if one partner decides to stray?
0:58.0	And then of course the wonderful Judith Carr, whose death was announced yesterday.
1:03.0	We heard just a little of a conversation we had in 2002 when she had just laid mug the cat to rest.
1:11.0	So this is the last week of foster care fortnight and annual campaign run by the fostering network to try
1:18.0	and improve the recruitment of foster parents.
1:21.0	A child goes into care every 20 minutes in the UK.
1:26.0	But how easy is it to find foster families to look after them?
1:30.0	And how well are those parents supported if they decide to take on the job?
1:35.0	One more than 8,000 new foster families are needed in the next 12 months to meet the demand.
1:41.0	Jackie Sanders is the director of external relations for the network.
	...

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