Keeping It in the Family?

I heard an excellent edition of Start the Week on Radio Four a while ago, in which Andrew Marr interviewed a number of writers - AS Byatt, Colm Toibin and Will Eaves - about authors and their families.  I guess as a writer your family of origin is the most potent seedbed for ideas, although all the guests on the programme were in broad agreement that writing about them, if not an outright exercise of aggressive power, ran the risk of introducing 'disequilibrium.'

One of them referred to the relationship between WB Yeats and his father, "There may have been love involved, but love wasn't mentioned very much." This struck me as a fascinating starting point for a story.  It hints at the complexities of family ties, which both support and fetter. It also conjures up the emotional inarticulacy which makes writing such an interesting exercise - how people are unable to say what they feel, how oblique 'close' relationships can be, and how terrifying we find intimacy.

All of this is the stuff of great fiction, the indissoluble marriage of the domestic and the profound.  If you don't start writing it, I just might...