Muriel Spark - Relationship With Her Son

Relationship With Her Son

Spark and her son Robin had a strained relationship. They had a falling out when Robin's Orthodox Judaism prompted him to petition for his late grandmother to be recognized as Jewish (Spark's maternal grandmother, Adelaide Hyams, had married Spark's maternal grandfather, Tom Uezzell, in a church; it was unclear whether both of Adelaide's parents were Jewish). The devout Catholic Spark reacted by accusing him of seeking publicity to further his career as an artist. During one of her last book signings in Edinburgh she responded to an enquiry from a journalist asking if she would see her son by saying 'I think I know how best to avoid him by now'.

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