“She would have been the magnificent single, childless woman – she would have seized life,” Gemmell tells Guardian Australia. “All the opportunities came too late.”

Instead, Elayn’s frustration with missed opportunities bubbled over into her relationship with her highly successful daughter – now a columnist at the Weekend Australian and the author of 17 books, including the bestselling novel The Bride Stripped Bare. “You’re accelerating into the future, they’re in the past – they’re stagnating and you don’t have that curiosity about their lives and they feel it acutely,” Gemmell says.

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