"How Do I Keep My Sullen Daughter From Alienating My Wealthy Boyfriend?"

The writer may have asked The Spectator‘s “Mary.” We asked a bunch of dead people!

Writes the seeker,

Q. I am a widow with a 15-year-old daughter. I have been going out with someone for six months but he lives and works abroad and I usually go and see him. On the few occasions when he has come to stay with me and my daughter in England, she has been absolutely poisonous towards him. (She is just jealous. He is a very nice man.) Now he has invited us both to stay with him for a fortnight in the summer in his holiday house in Italy and I am at my wits’ end to know how I can get my daughter to behave on this holiday and prevent her from putting him off me because the ‘baggage’ is too difficult to handle. What can I do?

Freud: I’m leaving this one alone.

Marie Antoinette: I don’t understand. Why don’t you just stay at separate chateaux?

Vladimir Nabokov: Urbane, European boyfriend? Bratty 15-year-old daughter? Selfish, widowed mother? This should end well!

Joan Crawford: Isn’t there a bathroom somewhere she should be cleaning?

Nathan Bedford Forrest: I hate Italians.

Little Edie Beale: She’s jealous? YOU’RE JEALOUS!

Oscar Wilde: I find you unspeakably tedious.

Dorothy Parker:
You’re boyfriend’s married,
You’re daughter’s a pill.
I wish I didn’t, but
I know that drill.

Lizzie Borden: Watch your back.

Dare Wright: Why don’t you just live together, do elaborate photoshoots and play with dolls? What is this “going out” of which you speak?

Joseph Smith: And why is this young woman yet unmarried?

Jack Kerouac: Fuck You

Your problems solved [SpectatorUK]

Earlier: What To Do When You’re In Love With Your Sister’s Widower?