Taken over several years, the British photographer’s latest series shows her world narrowing as loss, and lockdown, strike

Lydia Goldblatt describes her book Fugue as a “story about mothering and losing a mother, intimacy and distance, told through photographs and writing”. It is a companion volume, in some ways, to an earlier project, Still Here , about the unsettled, intense landscape of love and loss generated by her father’s death. “The cultural silence around these emotions,” Goldblatt writes, by way of introduction, “the difficulty of navigating and giving voice to them, has made me want to suffuse them with colour and light.”

The pictures in Fugue were made over four years, beginning in 2020. The world of some of them is circumscribed by lockdown, life narrowing to the bubble of family. The photographer’s young daughters are insistently present in the pictures, climbing and clinging and needing notice. “Abundant” is her word for them. Her mother is already an absence; the words in the book chart not only her loss but also the responsibility of clearing and decanting her London home.

Fugue is published by Gost (£45) in June. An exhibition of the photographs, with Robert Morat Galerie, will be on display at Photo London 2024 , Somerset House, 16-19 May

We can get into the habit of thinking about our sibling with judgment and criticism

The question Since our mother’s death, my brother and I have had no contact . He lives more than 100 miles away. Our relationship has been very difficult for over 40 years. When we both had young children, things were better for a time. When our dad died, Mum’s health deteriorated and she moved in with me and died 12 years later. During this time, my relationship with my brother was at its worst. Before retirement, we both worked in mental health, but neither of us understand why our family relationship has been so fractured.

There is a family history: our grandfather did not get on with his sister, he and his wife kept secrets, and our dad fell out with his twin! Our childhood was difficult as our father had mental health issues.

Why tie the knot with someone you have lived with for years – and what happens next? Three women share their stories

On the surface, marriage might not appear relevant to many Australians today. Indeed, most women and half of men say that’s so . De facto couples enjoy the same legal rights as their wedded counterparts, one in seven Australians are in a de facto relationship, and a new survey showed a 15% drop in marriage rates among young Australians between 2001 and 2021 . Yet sometimes even long-term de facto couples are choosing to marry, even after decades (and multiple children) together.

Why? And more pertinently: after such a long time, does it change anything?

Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads

Scientific studies cannot agree on the relative importance of genes and environment on how we turn out as adults

The eternal mystery of how much we are shaped by our parents – or how much we shape our children – was stirred again last week with the publication of a study that suggests that we are less like our parents than we had previously thought.

Led by René Mõttus of Edinburgh University’s department of psychology, the study looked at more than 1,000 pairs of relatives to establish how likely children are to inherit what psychologists call the “big five” or “Ocean” personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The lead singer on hitting it big, how things fell apart, and the joy of the 1980s revival

Born in Liverpool in 1957, Carol Decker is the lead singer of T’Pau. She was fronting Shropshire band the Lazers when she met BT engineer and musician Ronnie Rogers, with whom she would go on to form T’Pau. Together they became one of the biggest-selling groups of the 1980s, with tracks such as China in Your Hand and Heart and Soul . The group split in 1992 but have since had a renaissance as part of 80s nostalgia tours. They perform at Let’s Rock Scotland and Let’s Rock Leeds festivals this summer.

T’Pau were on tour in Switzerland when the NME decided to cover us. Their vision for the shoot was: the band are at the height of their success with the world at their feet, but Carol is a pizza girl at heart.

The law is badly lagging behind when it comes to rights for LGBTQ+ families. We need urgent root-and-branch reform

The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act is 10 years old . In the UK, any couple can marry . Likewise, thanks to this courageous pair , any couple can now get a civil partnership. On marriage, the law has kept pace with the diversifying society it exists to regulate and protect.

If you reflect on what was updated – the religious institution of marriage – and how long it had been the way it was, it hits you afresh how monumental this step forward was. Yet here we are. The equality of love has become a cliche. Young children have only known a world where every auntie and uncle they’ll ever have could get married. It is meticulous and slow but ultimately, whether through parliament or the courts, the law moves forward.

Freddy McConnell is a freelance journalist

The Unexpected, the latest book by the economics professor, examines the uncomfortable and embarrassing parts of pregnancy that no one talks about

Emily Oster really hopes you don’t need to buy her new book. The 44-year-old tenured Brown University economics professor and firebrand has published a handful of bestselling titles, all focused on childbearing and child-rearing. “I always say I’m not going to write another book after I write a book because it feels like so much work,” she said. “The first three books really track my own journey, from pregnancy to raising little kids to having older kids.”

But the fourth installment in her “ParentData” – also the name of her blog, podcast and newsletter – quartet, The Unexpected , swerves into thornier territory than its predecessors: pregnancies with complications, and the risks inherent in any subsequent pregnancies. For the first time, she is not writing about her own experiences. “I was inspired by the questions that I got from other people rather than the questions that I had myself,” she said.

The sexual wanderings of a partner don’t always spell the end. Readers share their experiences of how their relationship came out the other side

• Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

What counts as infidelity varies from couple to couple and how they choose to handle it is also unique. A drunken kiss on the dancefloor might be innocuous to some; for others, a relationship-ending catastrophe.

How readers chose to approach their straying partners varied dramatically depending on the length and nature of their relationship and what shape the outside encounter took. If families and mutual assets were involved – and other relationship factors were stable – readers tended to double down on commitments, opting to frame such transgressions as an opportunity for growth and refreshment. And the further down the road couples had travelled together, the more likely they would stay together post-infidelity.

He is the one who should be saying sorry. There’s no miracle cure, but do consider therapy, and keep good people around you

• Every week Annalisa Barbieri addresses a family-related problem sent in by a reader

When I was a child I was bullied by my older brother. I am 41 now and I think this has really affected me throughout my whole life. He always picked on me, called me stupid, fat, ugly, worthless and told me that I was never good at anything. This went on every day until I moved abroad to live with my grandmother at the age of 17.

My parents never made me feel protected and never punished him or made him stop. I resent them for it and feel let down by them. I’ve spoken to my mum a few times in recent years, but it’s a bit too late now and I don’t want to make her feel guilty when she can’t turn back time.